Removing silicone from aluminium

[Pete Verdon]

A week or two ago I fitted a shower screen. The wall edge of it fits into an aluminium channel. The instructions say to run some silicone up the inner face of the channel, but the idea is that this stays inside the channel acting as an adhesive, rather than emerging from the gap and making a seal. There's a rubber doofer to do that.

It turns out that my alignment was better than I had thought, so the hefty amount of silicone I applied to fill the gaps actually had very little gap to fill, and squidged out of the edges. I cleaned most of it up while still wet, but I'm left with a thin film of silicone on both the glass and the aluminium channel. This is very visible through the glass, and I want to get rid of it.

I thought it would be simple enough with a tube of silicone eater, and I'm sure this will work fine on the glass. But I've (luckily?) just read the instructions and found a note: "do not use on aluminium". How else can I cleanly remove a thin film (far too thin to peel off) of silicone from polished aluminium?

Cheers,

Pete

[JimK]

razor blade? then will the remainder "rub" off perhaps? JimK

[The Natural Philosopher]

scalpel mate.

slice through the silicone and peel off excess.

[fred]

In article , Pete Verdon writes

On the glass I would use a stanley knife blade based scraper with a new blade, they really can get gown to the surface. If it's more than a smear I would make a cut perpendicular to the glass at the frame edge to get a clean line.

On the Aluminium I would wait, time is a great healer and in a month's time you may feel that the thin smear of silicone is not quite as noticeable as you first thought ;-). Realistically, the eater solution is barred, abrasive solutions could damage the finish on the Alu and in time a thin layer may lift and you can assist it by rolling it off with your fingers.

Hindsight being 20:20, the solution is to mask before using silicone, just in case.

[Dave]

I have posted this method a couple of time before, but I have not had any feedback from it.

Find some springy flat steel that is about 15 thou thick and no more than an inch wide (brain is too addled to convert to metric right now. OK, I have had too much whisky) and wrap the end that you will hold in lots of tape to take away the sharp edge from your hand. On the other end, using a smooth file, shape it to have small rounded corners, about the diam of a pencil lead. File the cutting edge end, including the corners, so that it is shaped like a chisel with the bevel upwards. After you have done this, you have to remove the burr that has been formed underneath, by filing back to the handle with the file flat to the underside of the scraper. This is *vital* to the operation of this scraper. Failure to observe this will result in scratches to anything that is softer than the scraper. Use your finger nail to detect anything that might make a scratch by drawing it over all of the cutting edge, from handle to end.

The idea is that you bend it flat, cutting end level with the working surface and curved up into you hand close to the area that you want to clean up and it shouldn't leave any trace that you have used it. You

*have* to ensure that the cutting edge is too flat to the surface to dig in. Ensuring that there are no burrs means that they won't scratch the surface either.

Try an obscure area first. Usual disclaimers apply.

Dave

[The Natural Philosopher]

I have found NOT trying to get it thin, and scalpelling off thick pieces that wont break when torn off, to be the best plan.

[Clot]

That's a good juxta-positioning of posts. I tend to vacillate between the approach you take and the one Fred does. Still sitting on the fence!

[Pete Verdon]

[snip building of Special Tool]

Thanks, but it sounds an awful lot like the flexible knife blade I've already been using. This takes off damn nearly all of it, but a tiny amount still remains and on glass in sunlight it's quite visible (as a dirty smear) and on polished aluminium it's also apparent.

Thanks for the suggestions; I'll probably use the silicone eater on the glass, which is the most obvious part. I'll maybe try a washing up pad on the alli, together with lots of time.

Pete

[Clot]

What are thumbnails for?

[gazz]

when it;s just a smeer, i find i can rub it off with my fingers, it's gotta be totally dry, but then just rub the silicone fairly hard, and it tends to flake up and come off,