"Soft Touch" remover

Not according to the bottle of "Langlow Mineralised Methylated Spirit" I have here. "Contains methanol

Reply to
Dave Liquorice
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As a chemist I have to disagree. Meths is mostly ethanol with a few percent of methanol, a bitter tasting substance (?pyridine?) and for retail sale a blue dye. Colourless meths is available for laboratory use

Malcolm

Reply to
Malcolm Race

Reply to
Clive George

Maybe you could drop that on the wiki, someone will be glad to know. I shall avoid anything soft touch!

NT

Reply to
meow2222

Reply to
Dave Liquorice

Reply to
Clive George

It's an age thing, i bought a brand new sealed controller for my Gaystation3 last year, it's some fancy one made by Fanatec (of very expensive but excellent & realistic usb wheels and pedals fame) that has pivots between the 2 hand holders so you steer by moving your hands left and right, sounds weird but it's actually very good, miles better than the thumb stick for steering, not as good as a real wheel and pedals, but they wont work in bed as thats where i wanted to play GT6 and GTA5.

Anyhoo, they only made these controllers upto about 2002, this games shop in italy had some old stock of them they were flogging on ebay for a fraction of the price they were new, but they included a warning that most buyers complain about the soft touch coating having deteriorated and become sticky,

I bought one anyway, and the controller was in one of those bastard plastic shrunk on casing thingies (the anti shoplift packing you need scissors to get into, and even then manage to cut you self on the sharp edges of the plastic as you prise the item out)

Sure enough the soft touch coating was sticky, no one had ever used it, cleaned it or owt, and i presume it was stored in a darkened stock room or under artificial light in the shop (it had a cardboard outer that covered about 60% of the controller, and the entire coating had deteriorated)

At first i gave it a good dusting of corn starch, this absorbed the stickiness, but as it was something held in sweaty hands that didn't last long, and i got fed up of re-applying the corn starch, and tried to remove the coating,

i took it apart, and i found the best way was to use a plastic scraper to get most of the coating off, i gave the scraper a very light coat of white spirit to help it do it's job, but as the controller had many many curves i couldn't get it all off that way, fingernails got annoying, so i resorted to putting the parts in very hot water with a little bit of white spirit, washing up liquid, swarfega (the stuff with the grit in it) and gave it a good scrubbing with some of those white scourer pads.

Took a while but i got it all off in the end,

Reply to
Gazz

Wiki says:

Two species of the Ecuadorian fungus Pestalotiopsis are capable of biodegrading Polyurethane in aerobic and anaerobic conditions such as found at the bottom of landfills. Degradation of polyurethane items at museums has been reported.

Probably not much help...

Reply to
polygonum

If you can't get it off, how about putting chalk dust on it? It'll still look awful, but it might at least not feel so sticky.

Reply to
Etaoin Shrdlu

things.

Quite:

Spirits of Niter - Nitric Acid Spirits of Vitriol - Sulphuric Acid

Reply to
Dave Liquorice

formatting link

Probably full of spolling errors, bad grammer etc.

Reply to
Dave Liquorice

nice one

NT

Reply to
meow2222

I've used talc on a pair of binoculars and it seems to have worked, not looking too bad. In my case, the cause of the sticky decomposition was 50% DEET (Jungle formula) mosquito repellent on my hands, so perhaps this applied as a solvent to the "rubber" would help remove it?

Reply to
John Weston

Now with pictures and less spelling errors. B-)

Reply to
Dave Liquorice

Liking it

NT

Reply to
meow2222

I had this problem on a Psion 3c and meths removed all the stickyness leaving an undamaged, smooth finish.

test on a small out od sight area first.

- Mike

Reply to
Mike

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