White Protective Coating.

My RV8 project has numerous areas that have the old style white protective coating. Actually, well over half the aluminum has the blue stuff. I have attempted to remove it with just about every product my (well equipped) hangar has, to no avail.

This stuff will scrape off, but not cleanly. The adhesive is tenacious, and seems impervious to everything. A heat gun just makes it worse.

Any thoughts out there?

peeling plastic

We have had that problem too. The white plastic sas so brittle it would break before it would peel. We used a power washer to peel the plastic and then used a paint stripper that claimed to be safer to remove the adhesive.
I tested it on some scrap aluminum for three days and it did not discolor or etch it. I put it on and left it for about 5 minutes and used a scotchbrite pad and water to clean it off. It worked great. Warning! The stripper labeled "Aircraft Paint Stripper" said not for use on aircraft.
On the plastic that barely peeled, we found that heating it with a hair dryer helped. To much heat made the plastic brittle and not enough did not help. Very tedious.
Some of ours was so bad we almost decided to buy new skins.
Good luck

Paint stripper

Jimmy: Thanks for the tip. Never seen anything stick like this plastic. The pressure washer idea may open things up a bit, as the plastic "cracked" in .250 inch wide strips the entire width of the original installation, as if it had a grain to it. This may allow the pressure washer to flake off anything not firmly attached. Vinyl removal wheels simply melted the material back onto the Aluminum.

I've got the same problem with one wing panel. Glad it's only one. All the blue came off pretty easily. Emailed Vans to see if they have heard of any other tips to get this stuff off. I know - should have taken it off a long time ago. I hope this doesn't give away the vintage of my wing kit.

Orange stripper

A friend saw my efforts to get the "white stuff" off, went to his hangar and returned with a spray can of an orange stripper. As in orange tree orange, not color. Once you get the plastic off the orange stripper removes the adhesive in a jiffy. I think that the plastic was easier to remove when pretreated with this product, but further research is required to prove this out.

Sorry, no name for this stuff, has been discontinued. There appears to be numerous similar product out there, however.

Vans got back to me saying several builders had elected to replace the part rather than trying to get the white stuff off. I don't want to do that on an installed wing panel, so - gas, stripper, heat, whatever it takes - I will get it off.

Got er done

I've been putting off getting the white plastic off one wing panel hoping for a miracle, or a couple weeks of nothing else to do - not likely. I had some seaming tape left over from waterproofing my crawl space years ago. It is tough and has the best holding power of any tape I've ever seen. Taped it to the white plastic and pretty much rolled most of it off. Some areas that were especially brittle and cracked had to be helped a little with a razor blade. The whole job only took about 4 hrs. No heat, no chemicals, no abrasives.

Just another way of doing it for anyone who still has some of this stuff. YMMV.

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