So if you guys do that in combination with beer technique or cigarette like Khas it will be a lot easier.
Only thing that worries me guys(USA and rest of the world) is what paint thinners do you have on your market… Maybe your are with stronger chemicals or more flammable for example?
On our market there are really some expensive paint thinners which I (and probably 80% of nation) never tried them.
So I will say if you will buying them use the universal thinner cheapest available. They should not cost more than 2-3$ per liter.
If you inhaled dish washing fluid that would probably be just as bad.
The point is that you should have decent ventilation when stuff like that is in the air.
Open a window and turn on the exhaust or something.
If I only knew that it will cause so much issues and questions I would never mentioned my nitro paint thinner method.
Members like MEM, Mitko and now Saabluster holds their small secrets for themselves and I was stupid enough to reveal mine.
Now I know there are way more clever than I am. So this will be another “school” for me.
And the most interesting thing is when I already gave my detail described method that really works people tend to do it on their way anyway.
So good luck guys I am really not mad or anything but I am unsubscribing from this thread. I don’t have nerves for this paint thinner discussion any more.
A tiny ‘pressure cooker’ would be awesome, maybe Djozz can find a tiny “autoclaaf” (iirc) on his job.
I have a metal sealable cylinder that i use for gas dedoming by the way.
I can heat it up to more that 100°C without a problem.
It doesn’t seal perfectly (anymore, it’s old) but very little fumes escape and i use it in the bathing room near the air suction vent.
I would never heat up thinners without a cover in a badly ventilated room.
Problem with these chemicals (here at least) is to cut through the branding and dumbed-down marketing. Way I see it there are four main ‘products’ of interest over here:
The common ‘paint thinner’ is something called Varsol, which is an Exon-Mobile trademarked petroleum distillate. It is a mixture of C7-C12 hydrocarbons. $10 for 4 liter. Should work better than automotive gasoline? Like you, most people here have some around the house. https://www.homedepot.ca/en/home/p.paint-thinner—–378-l.1000130966.html
Another generic product is ‘lacquer thinner’, able to dissolve plastics and resins. Sounds closest to what you are using. It used to contain toluene (and a soup of other stuff, depending on the brand name), but may not anymore due to environmental concerns. $17 for 4 liter. https://www.homedepot.ca/en/home/p.lacquer-thinner—–378-l.1000130937.html
He’s just trying to make a big deal about him “unsubbing from this thread” because apparently he is upset I didn’t read the last 800 posts and said the same thing about ventilation as he did before.
I am very happy you revealed your method, I have tried many different solvents available here in Denmark but they didn’t work very well. The method I use have worked for me so far so I will keep using it.
That’s the kind of stuff that pisses me off about some of the folks in this forum…“secret methods”. Thank you for sharing your method, it was very nice of you. To me this forum is about helping others that are in the same hobby as you are. It’s not about…haha,I’ve got a better way and I’m not telling you…crap like that belongs on the “other forum”…not on BLF.
I’d like to say thanks to everyone who shares their tips in this thread. I’m a hot high octane person. I use very hot high octane gasoline. I started doing this myself after I found out that trying to de-dome in gas during the winter wasn’t working that well. Old Lumens was having great success in his sweltering workshop and I always had good success when I first started because it was summer time. When winter hit it wasn’t working as good so I started heating up my gasoline. I put my emitters in a small porceline crock that I fill about a quarter full (little less than that) and float on top of a large bucket of super hot water.
The Hot high octane does work with the SST-40’s but it’s not as clean as the one with the mystery solvent. I say “mystery” because it’s hard to know exactly what it’s made of. Here in the US our solvents have become more “green” (for lack of a better word). Everything we use is now more environmentally and medically safe.
I used to restore Victorian houses for a while and painted a ton of them using oil paint. Of course we used a paint thinner and Yes I also washed my hands and equipment with it. But at the same time my wife who “does nails” was also using similar products to remove nail polish. As the green movement hit our solvents became weaker and weaker and less effective as well. (Same thing goes for the freon and other products used in refrigeration).
On the “mystery” product; My first thought was that the “nitro” part of the name had to come from “nitrocellulose”. Nitrocellusose is a type of finish, it’s a “lacquer”. I’ve used it to finish guitar bodies and I have seen it used on cars. In the US we also have Lacquer Thinner. But not all lacquer is the same, far from it. So come companies make a lacquer thinner that matches their own brand of lacquer. Cars use a different lacquer than guitars. So which solvent to try? Again this is very hard to say it might not be any of them “exactly”. That’s why it would be nice to know exactly what the ingredients are in the “mystery” solvent. It’s also likely that it’s a combination of chemicals just like our other various solvents on the market are. But in the US one of the missing ingredients from going “green” is often Toluene. Yes they actually used Toluene as an ingredient in nail polish remover and paint thinners. Also most cars are no longer finished with any type of nitrocellulose product.
I’m guessing that even the solvents used at body shops are not going to be the same as they once were. However, as some people are still painting and finishing cars the old fashioned way, someone in that industry probably has access to the old style Nitrocellulose thinner. Same can be said for guitar luthiers. (I do french polishes on my guitars but not with nitrocellulose). StewMac is one of the luthier shops that I use and they have two different types of Nitrocellulose thinner. One is their own brand and one is brand specific. These might be worth a try. I have also seen a type of nitrocellulose thinner that is used by some of the guys who paint and finish cars. That might be even closer to the mystery solvent. It’s also possible that none of these are the exact solvent because it might simply be that the mystery solvent is one of our Pre-“Green” paint thinners. These new solvents might be missing a number of chemicals actually.
I’ll try out a few of these solvents and see if I can find one that works as well as the mystery solvent. Hopefully I’ll find something that I can share in this thread to help add something of value. Mostly though I will be trying to find something to work better on the harder domes that are more difficult. The Hot High Octane method works great on the XML’s and XPG domes already.
Thanks again to everyone who is helping out on this thread.
I thought about toluene as well, but I couldn’t really tell from your comment on it if you were saying that the “mystery” stuff was mostly Toluene or if you were referring to the stuff Jdozz used that didn’t work so well.
Pretty much all of the solvents have a different “special” add mixture of various chemicals. If it is Toluene that works correctly then that would be very cool. Maybe you could try it and report back to us? That would be cool too. Right now I’m trying a stripper that has toluene in it that I had laying around from a project. It also has acetone (which will remove domes but not that great), methylene chloride and methanol.
Same here. I was surprised they had any in stock at all, but they did have a gallon of Toluene at the hardware store in town, something like $26 though. (Which I’d pay if it actually worked really well). I’m sure it would be cheaper at a large hardware store, but for me that’s an hours drive away.
I’m almost sure that Toulene is the ingredient that does the trick. I have a thinner with over 80% toulene, 15% acetone and a few percentage of methyl and isobutylene. It dedomed an xm-l2 in under two minutes. Completely clean.
The tint was however not so great. That’s why I’m still looking to get Nitro thinner.
Wow that’s fast. Too bad it changed the tint, hope you find the Nitro thinner.
I’m not worried about it for the XM-L2’s or XP-G2’s but I’d really like to find something that works wonders on the new SST-40’s. I love their output and the fact that they can be really over-driven in a big way. They seem to clean up good when I first cut the dome off and then use the Hot Gasoline trick but I’d like to see them be absolutely perfect if possible.
What was it you didn’t like about the tint change with toulene? I have only done a few , but my first few I tried with gasoline, turned green. Hot gas made a difference, in that they turned more yellow. I’m kind of color blind, so I don’t know if that makes a difference to most, but it seems more natural to me. I just use a shotglass (that I’ll only serve shots to someone else :rage: ), with gas, and set it in a pot, pouring in boiling water. The gas usually starts boiling within a minute. Xm-L2’s come completely clean within a few minutes. Xp-G’s, I might have to add more hot water, to get them clean. I am hoping for the minimum Tint change, but understand it’s going to happen. Thanks
