On Saturday, December 30, 2017 at 4:49:17 PM UTC-5, Blue Whale wrote:
There are some environmentally friendly aircraft paint strippers that work great as long as you do small areas at a time. If necessary cover with a plastic wrap to keep the area from drying out...then scrape the residue off with a plastic scrapper...repeat if necessary. Biggest issue is always around the rivets. The 1-23 wings were profiled with a lot of body filler. Here is a resource for paint stripper: http://solventkleene.com/Dzolve15R.html

Someone once said to me "the best way to remove the paint from a Schweizer is to fly it until the paint has peeled off" because once you go down the refinishing route.....it's gonna become a multi-year project for the club.

I think our club used the Dzolve mentioned above on a 1-26D or E a few years back. I think the consensus was that it worked about the same as the ones we used in the past but without as much of the nasty stuff. You do have to keep it covered and work in relatively small patches. Overall, 90% of the paint comes off pretty easily and the last 10% is the tough stuff. Lots of plastic scrapers and scotch brite pads.

This is an ideal project for a club, since it relies on a fair amount of elbow grease. You need one or two relatively skilled people to keep an eye on things (make sure nobody grabs a household hook scraper and starts gouging aluminum), and the rest just follow orders.

We've been averaging one refinish project or another in Aero Club Albatross for the last 5-6 years, and it's done a lot to build club spirit.

Erik Mann