Removing Old Paint From Plastic Parts

For a convesion project I hade to remove the old paint from a Märklin E63 (#3001) body. I purchased this as a used item via Ebay, where it was offerd as a "diesel" due to the missing pantograph. Moreover, the previous owner had painted the roof in green neon colour..... However, the old paint was worn, anyway...

The picutre shows how the shell looked when the old paint had been removed. But how has the job been done, due to the fact it's not so easy to remove paint from plastic parts, because many dissolvers may damage that material.

Just before work could start, it had to be considered what dissolver could used. Certainly no dissolvers like Aceton.

On a point on the interior side of the shell, I tried Esban EPR pain stripper, a special dissolver for cleaning brushes. It's produced by Scheidel, a firm located the small town of Hirschaid, located just between the cities of Nuremberg and Bamberg. If the chemical would have damaged i.e. dissolved the plastic, one wouldn't have see it afterwards. But nothing happened to the material this way, except the effect I wanted: the old paint was stripped off.

So I had found just the right chemical for this purpose. Some sections of the old paint were harder to remove, but it was still better then the risk of a irreparably damaged shell.

After all of the old paint had been removed, the part showed this glaring red colour. A real shock for die-hard markliners, who always associate the Märklin name with "heavy metal". In reality, however, Märklin was one of the pioneers in using plastic among model train manufacturers.

However, there's still one open question left: is this chemical undangerous for all kinds of plastic?

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