Need some ideas

A friend of mine has an old milk can (galvanized steel) that has been painted a couple of times and he would like to strip the paint off but he can be rather sensitive to harsh chemicals. Any ideas. I told him how smart you guys and gals are :smile:

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soda blaster.

(depending on the type of paint, soaking it in coca~cola for a day or two and hitting it with a brillo pad might work. Coke eats through a lot of organic stuff).

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The citrus based strippers are very effective, you just need to give them plenty of time to work.

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My first thought was the citrus stripper too but another idea is a wire brush on an drill. It will leave swirls on the steel but they are kind of cool looking. As it is galvanized make sure he wears a respirator if he goes the steel brush route.

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Heat gun.

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Word of warning if you use a wire-brush on a drill: wear protective clothing. I had a wire fling off of one of those and embed itself in my knee. Four or five years ago. Still in there.

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I like the heat gun idea. If it doesn’t work you can always kick it up a notch…

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Yikes. That precludes you getting an MRI by the way…

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if you have a tank big enough, i’d try to remove it electrolytically, maybe. but otherwise with enough chemical paint strippers, anything comes off eventually. i wouldn’t want to try and blast or burn the whole thing personally, but either might be effective to move the traces left behind by stripping.

Yeah… let’s hope I don’t need a third ACL replacement on that knee. :head_bandage:

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Or face a really quick extraction… :grimacing:

Once you see a tossed aluminium plate plucked out of the air by an MRI magnet, you really begin to see the power they have. :astonished:

Is the paint only on the outside? And is he trying to save the galvanizing?

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Wouldn’t that just pull it out for him? Free metal splinter removal? :slight_smile:

out or through depending on his orientation to the DC field… :scream_cat:

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Yeah, but it’d be out then :slight_smile: Gotta be in more or less vertically from the mechanism of injury.

I’ve got one in a finger but it’s horizontal across. I think about just cutting it out with a razor blade (it’s close enough to the surface that I can see its shadow) but it’s in my left hand and that’s my dominant one for fine motor skills (like manipulating a sharp razor blade). I figure if it comes up & through during an MRI it’s gonna hurt like bejeebus but it’ll heal quick and the pain won’t be that long. :smile:

You say drill, I say grill…

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Unfortunately no, or I would have been able to extract it. It bent and twisted as I stood up from where I had been crouching (quite painfully). Unless it has moved a lot, it will probably be a matter of an x-ray and surgical extraction before I get another MRI.

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Let me tell you, until you have held a metal object in a MRI scanner, you have no idea how powerful this is. I participated in a study (actually really cool) run by a friend, where they had me doing increasingly complex realtime puzzle solving while in a fMRI scanner (watches realtime brain activity) and to indicate my choice had a laser pointer (“MRI safe”) taped to my hand. There was a teeny, tiny piece of ferrous metal in it (like the tiny spring under the button) and it was over 4lbs of force on my hand. Half the time they had me on my back and half on my front, and depending which it either wanted to tear away or through my hand (unless you know the direction of the DC field, you won’t know out or in until you’re inside). My arms ached for days afterwards…

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I believe the answer is yes, to both.

Thank you to everyone for your suggestions, I forwarded him a link to this thread so he could read them.