Removing Paint from a Model

I have been wanting to make some custom painted, Alaska Railroad passenger cars.  They would go well with an Alaska Railroad locomotive that I have, and a few of the McKinley Explorer cars.  I decided to start with several of their dome cars.  I wanted to make a couple of their ACF domes and a couple of their Budd domes.  The AFC domes were not a problem, I bought a pair of undecorated ACF dome coaches from Walthers City trains line (932-9581).  This all came about because I managed to find the pair of them for a bargain basement price.  So then I began looking for similar dome cars from Budd.  I knew Walthers had made some, because I have a model of the Empire Builder, and they were used on that train.  I searched all the websites and distributors I know of, but I was unable to locate any undecorated Budd domes, so I began searching for the cheapest ones I could find instead.  What I came up with was a pair of Empire Builder domes.  They are the same type of car I needed, just in the wrong paint scheme.

Before stripping paint, after the Turpenoid bath.
All photos by James Ogden.

As I contemplated how to turn the Empire Builder domes into Alaska Railroad domes, I thought of a few ways to go about painting them.  My first thought was to simply paint over the existing paint scheme.  The Alaska Railroad has a scheme that uses yellow and a dark blue.  The dark blue would go over the green and orange of the Great Northern easily enough, but I was concerned with the  yellow.  Being a lighter color, I was worried that it might show the original paint scheme a little, or require a ridiculous number of applications to properly hide it.  Not wanting to wast paint hiding paint, I decided to look around the somewhat limited resources of my work bench.  I found a can of Turpenoid that Steven had suggested I buy for various weathering projects.  Turpenoid is a cleaner for oil paints.  It is primarily designed to remove dried, or partly dried paint from brushes and hands.  I got thinking, Turpenoid is a paint remover, in a sense.  If it could remove paint from brushes and hands, maybe it could be at least moderately effective on a model.  I looked over the can to see the warnings and to determine if it was safe on plastic.  I could find nothing about it being harmful on plastic, so I decided to give it a try.

Car ends, after having the paint was scrubbed off.

I first placed the ends of the car in a plastic bag, and then poured a little Turpenoid in on top of them.  I sealed the bag, placed it in another one, and then placed the whole thing in a small bowl.  I wanted to contain leaks, if there were any.  Then I let them sit in their Turpenoid bath overnight.  I worked on a few other things, hoping the Turpenoid would not make my car ends disappear, and then went to bed.


The next morning, I got up and went to go look at the ends of the car.  They were still there!  That was a good start.   A little later, I took them out of the Turpenoid bath, and placed them on a plastic plate which had some Turpenoid in it.  I found a clean toothbrush on the workbench and decided to try scrubbing the paint off.  At first, it seemed like nothing was happening.  I looked over the end I was working with, and noticed that on some of the higher surfaces, the paint looked worn off.  Clearly that was the result of the Turpenoid and scrubbing, so I kept scrubbing, rinsing the toothbrush in the Turpenoid often.  Then, it seemed the results happened all at once.  As I was scrubbing, a hole appeared in the paint, revealing clean, grey plastic underneath.  Once that hole was there, things progressed faster, and in no time, most of the paint had come off.  I found that it took a little more work to get the paint out of some of the tighter spots, but as long as there was a fairly constant supply of clean Turpenoid, it just took some scrubbing.

Car side after removing the paint.  It is not perfect,
but it is clean enough to repaint.

Once all the paint was off the end of the car, I rinsed it in warm water, to get the Turpenoid and any sticking paint chips off.  I set it to dry, and repeated the whole process with the other end of the car.  Both ends were green.  I did not think much of that until later.  That night, I placed the sides of the car in the Turpenoid to soak.  I removed one the next day and began working on it.  Just as with the end of the car, the paint came off easier once it had been broken.  I also noticed something I did not expect.  The silver, yellow, and green paint all came off relatively easily.  It requited a bit of scrubbing, but not an excessive amount.  Under everything was a coat of orange paint, and for some reason, that was significantly more difficult to get off.  I continued scrubbing, and it did come off, but I found that the other colors would come off in just a minute or two, while the orange would take several minutes.  I have not experimented with any other paint schemes or colors, because those were the only colors I had to remove, but it seems that different paints have different characteristics when removing them.  Either way, I was quite satisfied with the results.

After quite a bit of scrubbing, The models came out quite clean, actually much cleaner than I had anticipated.  The advantages to using Turpenoid is that is has a very mild odor, so it can be done indoors, on a cold day, with the windows closed.  Also, it is less powerful than paint thinner, making it safer to use, and safe on plastic.  The models did not seem effected at all by the Turpenoid, other than the fact that they lost their paint!  The plastic did not seem to weaken any or react at all to the Turpenoid.  While it may take a bit of work to scrub all the paint off and have a clean model, I think it was worth it for the results.  I still have one more car to remove the paint from, and I intend to do it the same way.  I just need to buy more Turpenoid!