soda blast or chemical strip?

[Mike G.]

i am ready to do the body on my 70 lt-1 convertible. i need to strip the car to see what i have and where to start. alot of my friends are telling me to get it soda blasted. its alot more money to do this. is it worth the extra money?

[Jack H.]

Re: soda blast or chemical strip?

The issue has come up several times before and there are prior threads in the archives to search/read. As I recollect, the consensus was pretty much to strip via chemistry vs. blasting with the issue being most shops have experience stripping via blast (regardless of media used) on METAL bodied cars which can be a detriment with fiberglass.

The detriment is controlling blast pressure so you do NOT eat into the factory original 'skin' of the press molded fiberglass resulting in a 'lunar surface' issue to deal with later...

[Dick W.]

Re: soda blast or chemical strip?

Soda blasting is very gentle to the surface. I watched a stripper do a '67, and he removed the paint layer by layer leaving the original primer on the car. I am having our '72 soda blasted before we hang the new front end on it.

[Mike G.]

Re: soda blast or chemical strip?

what is more appealing to me about the soda blast is they also do the bottom and inside the car. the convertible top area is dificult to do with stripper. someone had done that to my 57 and i had to re jel coat the glass in the trunk, under the hood and inside the car around the top. i spent a ton of money fixing that.

[Peter J.]

Re: soda blast or chemical strip?

Mike,
I used a chemical stripper from Home Depot (I think Bix heavy duty). It said safe on fiberglass and was a lot cheaper than stuff recommended by the parts catalog supply houses. Some areas required two coats but hard as I tried I could not get it go through the red oxide primer. That I wet sanded off with ease. I over rinsed the car as we have all heard the nightmares about not getting all the stripper off. Car is painted and a few years later no problems.

[Patrick N.]

Re: soda blast or chemical strip?

for what it's worth, I used a straight edge razor to remove my paint. It took just over 2 hrs to get all the paint off.

It was amazingly easy! The best thing is you dont run the risk of removing factory skin or having the glass soak in any chemicals that will damage your paint later on.

There's couple youtube vidoes to show the technique-real easy.

Pat

[Patrick N.]

Re: soda blast or chemical strip?

attached is an image of removing paint with a razor

[James W.]

Re: soda blast or chemical strip?

You should look into finding a company that uses dry ice as a media for removal. The nice thing about dry ice is that evaporates and leaves no trace after the paint is removed. We use this technique when media blasting steam turbine rotor assemblies in the our nuc, coal fired and gas turbines prior to performing NDE inspection. This all but eliminates any foreign object contamination inside the turbine steam path that might lead to further erosion of the rotor blading and stationary nozzles. This would also eliminate any foreign objects from media blasting from getting in your paint job.

Regards,

James West

[John D.]

Re: soda blast or chemical strip?

james,

Dry ice blasting sounds expensive !!??.....

[Stewart A.]

Re: soda blast or chemical strip?

Soda blasting is very popular ! It's very gentile. Under no circumstances use a media blast of plastic or sand. It kills the glass and will even expose your fibers in the surface of the glass. I must have a look at the razor blade footage. I pulled back my hood with a blade but it took 2-3 hours to do that.
maybe I was doing something wrong. Stewy

[David J.]

Re: soda blast or chemical strip?

I used the chemical strip (Captain something) I can look and get you the info if you are interested. I liked it because I had control over where and what was being striped.







If I had to do again I would use the same process.

[Stewart A.]

Re: soda blast or chemical strip?

Mike go on you tube there are heaps and heaps of down loads on corvette soda blasting. It really is the way to go. you can see it peeling away each layer as it sprays. It's pretty gentle stuff. You can get in to those hard corners where the paint strippers can be time consuming and messy. Stewy

[Dick W.]

Re: soda blast or chemical strip?

Since 1963 I have stripped cars by razor blades, lacquer removing solvent (no longer available, it is a carcinogen), Captain Lee's stripper, aircraft stripper, media blasting, sanding, you name it, I have done it and until something better than soda blasting comes along, that is all I will use

[Jim D.]

Re: soda blast or chemical strip?

What is the typical cost to soda blast a body?

Jim

[Dick W.]

Re: soda blast or chemical strip?

I believe about $700, done in your driveway