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Removing paint from cast-iron radiators


sugarfree
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Anybody know of any useful products for removing paint from cast-iron radiators?  Mine are ancient and I want to re-paint them, but before I can do so, I need to remove the old paint, which is already flaking off in parts. 

I suspect I will have to resort to sandpaper and old-fashioned elbow grease, but before I do, I just wanted to check that there are no wonder products out there that I'm missing (apparently the Americans have a good, low-toxicity one called SOY-Gel but I don't suppose it's available in France....)

Any advice gratefully received.

 

 

 

 

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I am with Bigmac,

Shot blast/sand blast is so much easier and effective. Problem with cast iron rads, once stripped of paint they beging to rust in around 30 minutes.

Nitromors is very similar to V3 decapant, and does irritate if it gets on the skin.

Alternative strippers (ECO friendly) which do actually work Removall 510 don't know if its available in France though.

Again problem with wet stripper is the rads will beging to rust very quickly (within minutes) so you need to be ready to start priming them asap.

 

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Depends if you are happy to drain the system, remove rads and cart to wherever, if you want to do the job in situ as I did then a heat gun, scraper and wire brush did most of it with a bit of nitromors or equivalent in awkward places, by the time you have gone over with a wire brush on the end of a drill, and painted a couple of times then the result was pretty good. A couple of rads had to be moved so we had them shot blasted and the finish was better, but revealed how rough the casting was in some places. Unfortunately we also discovered that one of the rads had a crack through a rib after being reinstalled, which it didn't have before the removal and shot blasting.
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If you are getting the Rads blasted then the next step would be to take them to the Powder coaters. If you were a purist then you would strip sectional rads back to their sections and then rebuild them after coating NOT  a job for the faint hearted...messy expensive and you then get to make up gaskets etc.

Powder coated 'Hospital Rads' look good

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