Removing overspray from canopy

Tools, Techniques, and Reference Materials Painting and airbrushing
1

Greetings,

I was spraying some small parts on one my the sprues in the kit I’m working on and unbeknownst to me, the canopy was sitting under a paper towel and somehow quite a bit of over spray tunneled its way in there and covered the whole left side of the thing.

I could use the open canopy but am hoping there’s a way to salvage this one first. I tried gently scraping the paint off with my knife but there’s enough of it that I don’t think it’s possible without destroying the transparency.

Any suggestions? Appreciate it!

~J

2

What type of paint?

3

Ah, good question lol. Acrylic.

4

Soak in windex

5

[dto:] what Nathan said. Should come right off. Maybe a little rub with a q-tip after the soak.

6

you can also try Testors Easy Lift Off ELO it wont hurt the plastic . follow up with a dip in future and your back in buiseness.

7

Thanks for the tips, didn’t have quick access to the ELO but will have to try it next time. (I’m sure there will be one) The windex didn’t work, I suspect it’s probably due to the fact that the paint had sufficient time to cure, a detail I neglected to mention. I’m sure if it was relatively fresh, the paint would have come right off. I ended up just scraping the paint away carefully and then buffing the plastic with a nail polishing sponge. I then dipped it in future to hopefully level out and shine up any dull spots. It’s going to be far from perfect but I hope it comes out ok after it dries.

8

what brand of paint? I suppose if you let it soak in windex or simple green for 24 hours and its done nothing then its too late.

9

Tamiya. I scraped it off carefully and dipped it in future. It came out pretty good. I’ll definitely rember to be more careful next time.

10

That’s weird. Windex should have taken Tamiya paint off very easily…even if its cured. Heck, yesterday I wiped off some Tamiya paint off of two parts that was applied about 4 weeks ago using Windex.

11

Weird, admittedly, it didn’t soak for 24 hours. I soaked the canopy for 2-3 hours and thought that would be sufficient. If I run into this issue again I’ll try letting the piece sit for a full day and see if I don’t have better results. Thanks for letting me know, if I did it wrong I’m glad to know to do it differently next time since this seems to be the simplest and cheapest solution.

12

One thing you don’t ever want to do is start scraping on a canopy with a knife. If you want to scrape it with anything, use the point of a round wooden toothpick. If I couldn’t have removed the paint with the Windex I probably would have used a fine sanding pad and then buffed it out and dipped in Future - but NO knives on clear parts (unless you’re using the back of a blade to remove a mold line from a blown canopy)

13

Thanks for the tip! I figured scraping was not the best idea but did use the back edge of the knife. After scraping I buffed the canopy with a super fine nail buffing block. Fortunately it came out pretty clear and after taking a bath in future it looks quite good, all things considered. I would have avoided the process altogether but I did still have the alternate, open version of the canopy that I was willing to use if I couldn’t have salvaged this one. A nice backup option that allowed me to get a little reckless lol.