The Scarlet Amiga - Part 2

Sooooo. The Scarlet Amiga is working. It's a KS1.3 early(ish) A500 with a Samsung keyboard, a tidied up A501 half meg memory expansion and, following a lot of careful calibration, a working floppy drive. But we still have that awful sloppy red paint to deal with.

Following a few test scratches, the paint has two or three distinct layers. On the top is the red oil based gloss paint. I suspect that this is the same as some might use to paint skirting boards. Underneath that is a softer white-ish layer that I think may be some sort of spray paint, presumably used as an undercoat. In some areas there is also a dark green 'smudge' of what might be paint but could equally be wax crayon...

I googled 'remove paint from plastic'. One suggestion was to use vegetable oil on it, which should lift the paint from the plastic without causing any damage. I did actually try this as it would be non-destructive and if it worked would have been very cheap.

It didn't work. It just made the case oily.

Next up, isopropyl alcohol. This was a long shot as it's more a de-greaser than a paint remover.

That didn't work either. It just made the case shiny.

Next. Nail varnish remover (acetone basically). Mrs Crashed has (or had) a bottle of purple nail varnish remover which, to be honest, was a bit stronger than I anticipated. I put some across the top part of the case, near the AMIGA logo and within 10 seconds the paint had shrivelled and cracked. A quick scrape and a hug swathe of red paint was gone. BUT, where the acetone touched the bare plastic, the plastic started to melt and deform (she puts this stuff on her finger nails??) so, despite the promising results, I didn't continue with this.

By now we have a case that looks like this:

And so it starts...

More work has been done here - mostly around the inside of the keyboard

While trying to pick out the Amiga logo my hand slipped and, despite my best efforts, I failed to injure myself but I did put a large scratch in the paint. It was immediately apparent that large areas of the paint could be scraped off relatively easily using a handy scalpel with a flat square blade. This is the result of a couple of nights of scraping:

Getting there....

A smaller blade allowed me to get into the vents to some degree and soon, almost the entire top was back to an almost normal colour. A few more nights scraping and we've reached this point.

Vents waiting to be cleared

Almost done...

Fun fact. Do you know how many small ridges there are on the back of an Amiga A500 case? Seventy five. SEVENTY FIVE. S E V E N T Y  F I V E. Each one had to be scraped out by hand. 

It took over a week to get all of the solid red paint out of those ridges. If I'm honest, had I started by doing these ridges first it would have gone in the bin and I would've been searching ebay for a new case. But that would be cheating. :)

Red Gloss GONE

I realised some time ago that this case is not going to be suitable for selling. Even if I'd managed ti get all the paint off with no scraping or melting plastic, it was still in relatively poor condition.  Anyway, after all the effort I have put in I have decided that I will keep it for myself. 

There is still a lot to do on this case before I consider it finished. I intend to sand it down to remove the last bits of white/red paint and then I shall look at polishing it. This means it will lose it's customary patterned finish but, what the hell. It's my Amiga. :)

More updates soon..