Removing failed rubberised coating from equipment.
One of my pet hates is the soft-touch rubberised coating some manufactures put on their kit. It invariably fails sooner or later. Indeed, I’ve had quite a lot of kit over the years where the rubberised coating has failed. Fortunately it is usually fixable – or to be more precise, removable. Depending on the coating’s formulation, and the substrate material, petrol and/or isopropanol and a little ‘elbow-grease’ will normally remove the sticky mess. Unfortunately, sometimes lettering and legends come off too.
Nevertheless, I have successfully removed failed rubberised coatings many times, even on some quite expensive kit, E.g. AOR 8200 wide band radio scanner, Sony ICF-SWT1000 multiband receiver/cassette-corder and my trusty Degen 1126 Radio/MP3 player/recorder. All of which work perfectly following their clean-up.
How to remove failed coating
Firstly you need to find a solvent that actually attacks the rubber gunge without damaging the plastic substrate. My favourite two solvents for this sort of repair are petrol (US: gasoline) and isopropanol. Important, try the solvent first on a small hard to see area. If that works and does not denature the underlying plastic, then…
- Dismantle the equipment as far as necessary and remove the works from the shell.
- Clean the sticky gunge off the shell using small amounts of isopropanol or petrol on clean pieces of white kitchen towel, or similar. A small pl;astic scraper can be useful in this context too.
- If you used petrol, then clean off any petroleum residue with isopropanol.
- Allow to dry, reassemble and test.
Mobile phone that turned into a sticky mess
As it happens, I had occasion to raid my box of old mobile phones this afternoon, looking for a working ‘BL5C’ battery. As I withdrew my hand, one of the old phones was literally stuck to my fingers. Its rubberised coating had completely broken-down, forming a nasty, sticky, treacle-like mess. So I took a few snaps of the recovery process…
I don’t actually have any petrol – well only in the car. But sometimes isopropanol will remove this sticky on its own. So I tried it and it worked. Though it took several attempts to remove it all. I also used a standard mobile phone screen removal tool as a gentle scraper to remove the clumps of rubberised gunge.
It took 5 sheets of Tesco kitchen paper, 30 millilitres of 99.9% isopropanol and around 20 minutes of ‘elbow-grease’, but eventually I removed it all. And the printed legends remained mostly in tact.
And even though I didn’t even bother to dismantle the device, it still worked…
