To anyone who's used de-solv-it graffiti cleaner on hard bodies..

[nowinaminute]

Did you ever experience a softening of the plastic?

I've used this stuff on some lexan shells with no issues and on one Tamiya and one Nikko hard body which was also fine.

At the moment I'm working on another Nikko hard shell but after doing a test patch on the underside of the shell, the plastic becomes soft afterwards, it's easy to scratch with a finger nail and you can feel resistance vs the untreated plastic being tougher and smoother.

I have left it for 24 hours and it seems to be getting hard again but I might just be imagining it.

The question is, has anyone else experienced this and does it get better? Will the plastic degass or whatever after a few days?

The tricky thing is I need to preserve the stickers so I can't just dunk it in brake fluid or whatever and de-solv-it is a gel and works fast so it's better for using as a spot cleaner which I need in my situation. The shell is black plastic but some little berk sprayed patches of gold and silver xmas paint on it at some point.

 

[TWINSET]

Years ago there were some similar products from Delta, and they had varying results on vintage hard bodies - Chris melted a Rough Rider body and the company suggested it might be due to high polystyrene content in the plastic.
I melted the sunroof from a Ford Ranger too, but not the main shell - The sunroof remained 'sludgy' after that, almost like it'd been smeared with chewing gum - even after  a lot of cleaning, the plastic never hardened off again.

 

[Fabia130vRS]

Quite common with such agressive paint remover.

[53HRA]

It’s been great to me on many shells, but my old king hauler felt softer. A bit too soft. Ended up replacing it in the end 

[nowinaminute]

Thanks for the input guys, strangely it does seem to have hardened again.

Not sure how to proceed now. I might try some gentler alternatives first and then go back to the graffiti cleaner as a last resort. It has definitely tougheneed up compared to how it was though.

The shell seems fairly scratch prone anyway, I notice some old plastic gets this way but I don't want to make it worse even if the truck ends up as mostly a shelf queen.

It was only after getting into RC that I realised how many different plastics there were and how they behave differently with different chemicals. Some go soft with iso alcohol and some not, some don't like graffiti remover and some do etc. And even without any chemicals in the equation, some plastic is more scratch resilient than others but this doesn't necessarily correlate with how hard the plastic is. Some supple and soft plastic is harder to scratch than some types of rock hard plastic.

 

 

[max69vk]

Thought I’d chime in on this briefly. I exclusively use De-Solv it on my hard bodies and yes it can make the plastic slightly soft after the initial use.

What I have found though is that if you apply for 10 minutes and then keep re-applying whatever drips off with a regular paint brush (whilst gently rubbing at the same time) you can get most paint and residue off within an hour without damaging the plastic. At the end I’d always recommend brushing off the excess with the paint brush & then coating the shell in fairy liquid before rinsing it off, this seems to remove any paint/remover residues that might try to stick back to the shell. Also after rinsing off with fairy liquid/clean water the shell seems to harden back up a lot faster too.

 

[nowinaminute]

Just to update a little.

The test patch I did that went a bit soft hardened right back up in time and the slight residue that was quite stubborn at first rubbed off easily after a week or so. After that I tried another test patch on the wing which also left the plastic slightly soft and a whiteish but after a few days the plastic toughened up and the residue became easy to buff off. This is how the wing looks now:

Today I took on the bed of the truck which has the highest concentration of paint:

I gave it a coating and agitated it every 5 minutes or so and then rinsed it of with fairy liquid, all the gold came off and I was left with the slight softness and the whiteish residue:

The residue will scratch off with a fingernail and I'm tempted to try and polish it off but the sensible part of me is telling me to just be patient and wait because it seems to rub off easily after the plastic has hardened again, if I try to aggressively rub it off while the plastic is soft I'll probably scratch it a lot.

I've treated the whole shell now so I'm going to leave it a week or two. Most of the shell only had speckles which I could spot clean instead of soak so those parts came up a treat without any softness or residue, wax on wax off basically.

Hopefully after its had time to settle the bed will buff up too.

I wish affordable colour vinyl printers/cutters were a thing, would have been easier to spray it and just make new decals!