How to remove spray paint from Mac Plus?

[Nick7928]

Hello everyone, I recently acquired a Mac Plus which is fully functional on the inside but it has been spray painted black in a very rushed manner thus making it look horrible. Is there any way to remove the paint without destroying the plastic? I will post pictures as soon as I come home from work.

Thanks everyone!

[NeXT]

DOT 3 brake fluid. It's more toxic that most cleaners but it doesn't attack the plastic and pulls it right out of the texture.
Soak a piece of paper towel, rub the painted area, place the folded paper towel over the paint with a weight and come back in an hour to wipe it off.

[Chuck(G)]

There are a lot of solutions; you should test them.

Citrus- and soy-based strippers are probably the safest (e.g. Soy-gel or Citristrip).
There are other water-based strippers, but they're mostly intended for stripping oil- and latex-based paint.

[KC9UDX]

Brake fluid will work but I'd use it as a last resort, because it will adversely affect the plastic if you don't quickly remove the brake fluid after the paint comes off. And I'm not really sure of a guaranteed way to get brake fluid off of or rather out of modern plastics.

[Agent Orange]

. . . then again why not repaint it as it was probably in pretty rough shape in the the first place. You can get spray paint for plastics at Walmart.

[NeXT]

Brake fluid will work but I'd use it as a last resort, because it will adversely affect the plastic if you don't quickly remove the brake fluid after the paint comes off. And I'm not really sure of a guaranteed way to get brake fluid off of or rather out of modern plastics.

Apple plastics, or more specifically Lisa plastics did not visually suffer from damage and in the long run have not run into weird issues ever since I left my panels soaking in a tub for an afternoon in 2012 to strip off several rattlecans worth of black spraypaint. Likewise water worked great to remove the fluid when I was done.

I will fully endorse and prove with pictures that it is not harmful to Apple's plastics used in the 80's and 90's.

[Chuck(G)]

That's funny--I had a Mac monitor that would disintegrate spontaneously with nothing stronger than water being used to clean it.

No kidding--I'd be sitting on the other side of the room and hear a "click-rattle" only to find that some part of the case had detached itself and fallen to the floor.

There were some terrible Apple plastics.

[NeXT]

Spindler-era plastics are known for that. It was cheap, the composition was poor and with age it became brittle enough that it would fall apart on its own.

[KC9UDX]

Brake fluid won't necessarily make plastic look bad. But it can turn it into gel or embrittle it, or just about anything in between, depending on the plastic's chemistry.

[NeXT]

I stand by my statement and encourage its use. I have been using it as the primary means of stripping paint off plastics for years now and have not yet run into an instance where it negatively reacted with the plastic.