I’ll rebuild an engine if it needs it. I’ll tune a carburetor if it’s out of tune. I’ll even weld in a rust hole if there’s something that needs patching. Why, then, is removing the plastic-dip from these Foxbody Ford Mustang split-tri-spoke wheels bothering me so much? Why is this such a pain in the rear?
The Autopian’s partnership with XPEL has us installing an amazing wheel/tire combo onto our 2014 Nissan Murano CrossCabriolet: Foxbody split tri-spoke wheels with incredible Vredestein all-terrain tires. I cannot wait to show you.
But I’m going to have to wait, because none of it is installed yet due to a small issue that has ruined many a car-person’s week: Plasti-Dip.
If you’re not familiar, Plasti-Dip is “an air-dry, specialty …. peelable, flexible, insulating, non-slip, durable rubber coating.” You spray it on a wheel/body panel/fence post or whatever, and before you know it, you’ve got a thin coating of rubber clinging to your object.
And boy does it cling. Really, really hard.
I didn’t even realize these Mustang tri-spoke wheels that I bought even had a coating on them until I started cleaning them in preparation for paint. Then I saw a little peeling, and figured I’d peel the rest off. It’s not happening. No matter what I try, I just can’t get this stuff off without risking damage to the rather minty tri-spoke underneath.
And this isn’t just a “me” issue (though I’ll admit I’m a Plasti-Dip amateur), it’s a problem many others are facing. Check it out:
“It. Will. Not. Come. Off.” with the horrified face is my favorite, though “Took me 2 1/2 hours to peel one wheel any faster way to get it off” is up there, too. The latter feature a few recommendations, like this one from RussianInAmerika:
Goo gone let it sit for 10 minutes; spray it again and let it sit another 10 min; right after go to local car wash with the rim brush and let it do its thing; goo gone after that again and let it sit for 10 min and then a pressure washer/scrub for minimal work/best outcome.
Goo Gone, WD-40, Tire Shine, Mineral Oil, all work good to remove stubborn dip. Tools like a toothbrush, a plastic Bondo spreader, an old credit card, I’ve used duct tape, all to get the peeling started. Once you have it started, I’ve used a heat gun or a hair dryer on lowest setting to help loosen dip too. Power washers and coin op car washes work well to spray clean dip.
For now, this whole Plasti-Dip removal process remains the bane of my existence.
$40? Worth every penny. What do you have into this so far? 4 hrs? You’re time is valuable. Assign an hourly wage to it… $30? So $120 in labor so far. Just buy the dissolver. Unless your using this as content to write about (which is fine), but then it might be better to compare 4 methods (one per wheel) and make a value assessment at the end.
Aircraft stripper.
You can get it as an aerosol or in big cans. I had a similar issue with the wheels on my mini only instead of plastidip it waa bed liner that someone put on them. Be prepared though it is extremely caustic so I’d do it in a metal tub if possible(sheep watering trough from a farm or garden store works great) and keep it as far from little Delmar(nhrn) as possible. It was able to strip off bed liner when I used it on wheels, and took the 14 layers of car paint off my old buick when I went to paint it myself years after the 90’s splatter job my parents had put on it against my will when I was a teenager. I’ll admit I haven’t tried it on powder coating yet so I’m not sure what it would do there but plastidip should be cake for it.
David calling these foxbody tri spokes is bugging the hell out of me.
These came on 94-95 models, known as SN95 mustangs. Easy ID is the 5 lug pattern, as only svo 84-86 mustangs had 5 lug from 79 to 93. So not a fox.
But the SN95 was a heavily modified fox platform.
So technically he is correct, but not correctly correct.
DT: I bought the cheapest available pressure washer! Look how much money I saved!
Also DT: My pressure washer did nothing!
I know that you tried the car wash pressure washer as well, but those have too gentle a tip (and some car washes have mediocre pressure). I guarantee that a decent pressure washer with a turbo tip will strip that off. It may also push water past the bead into your tires.
I’ve only had to remove Plasti-Dip a couple times but I’ve had luck with just spraying it with WD-40, letting it wrinkle, then hitting it with a decent power washer.
Hey Dad,
You are quickly realizing that throwing money at problems is actually a good thing, and well worth the cost in time.
-fellow Dad
Whenever possible, is the best solution.
– Another fellow dad.
When I was young with no kids, I was always like…”Why would I spend money on something I can do myself?” Those days are long gone and now I have zero time, so I’m like…”Why would I spend time doing something myself when I can just pay money and be done with it?”. It’s a hard lesson, but at some point you realize that time is worth more than money and if you don’t have the time or the money, maybe it’s a hint not to do something…which brings us to the reason I don’t have a boat.
-fellow Dad
Ditto! David is “going through the transition”, and it’s fun to read.
I saw the headline and I felt so SEEN.
I used duplicolor brand plastidip alternative when i got a set of wheels that were less than perfect. when i went to go strip the coating off a few years later, i didn’t even both with any of the by hand or chemical methods
i have three pressure washers (don’t judge me, i tried to start a business), a car wash electric unit, a light duty gas home and driveway wash unit, and a commercial unit i use for PW jobs- i just started with the biggest one with a 15 degree nozzle and for the most part the coating came right off
$40 versus many many hours of frustration? That is a bargain to these old eyes.
(I’ve used ‘Dip pretty often, but have never tried removing from wheels.)
SPEND THE $40, DAVID.
You’re dealing with multiple curved surfaces. The flat edge of a credit card won’t do much.
How certain are you that it’s plastidip and not acrylic paint? Anyway, just soak it in paint/ finish remover gel and wrap with Saran Wrap to keep it wet.
Find the person who originally applied it and have them remove it as penance.
Go to the folks who make the stuff and voila! you have a solution. The makers of Plasti-Dip make something to, wait for it…. remove it! https://www.dipyourcar.com/products/dip-dissolver?srsltid=AfmBOopHicr5wh-l6fz0Vycs2Qhtzn4Fsnuf2ZGX7rieFOJMV_VCxpcu
He literally mentions this in the article…
I should have clarified. My main point is that it is a big long article about how difficult it is and you have a perfect solution already. But $40 is “too much” ergo a long and silly article.
Xylene, but the problem is you need to soak it the stuff to really work easily and that’s impossible with the tires on the wheels. If you can remove the tires, get a large thick polyethylene bag and round pan a bit larger than the wheels. Place bag in pan, place wheel face down in bag, add xylene until spokes are covered, remove excess air and double seal bag. Wait three days then check. If soft, use course brushes, plastic scrapers, rags, anything to remove the stuff before it cures again. Leave xylene in bag for next wheel and use until it it’s too saturated to soften any more dip. Xylene does not dissolve polyethylene at room temperatures, but it should eat plasti-dip effectively.
This post brought to you by specious know-it-all-ism.
Nice to know that unless I bring out a flame thrower that plasti-dip is staying on. Was this a subtle advert for their product, David? Hey, diapers for a new born are expensive and I applaud your subtle use of reverse psychology here! I have a sudden urge to plasti-dip every frickin thing in my house and garage.! your deed is done. Again, congrats on the new kiddo. You thought life gave you joy when you scraped rust off of an old Jeep? Aint shit compared to how you’ll feel when your kiddo sets up by himself for the first time. Please tell me your not giving that kid shower Gerber cereal. You already baptized the kid on the head with oil…………..
I was going to recommend a torch to just melt it off, done on a WalMart parking lot so you don’t have to worry about the mess.
I had to do this when I was in school, it was awful. I work in a chemical plant now, and we have to have the SDS of everything we have on site. It’ll tell you what hazardous solvents they use to keep it a liquid, when those solvents evaporate off it dries into a plastic layer. The solvents on the Plasti-Dip uses are:
I’m not a chemist, I do quality control, but basically all of these solvents are used to make adhesives (among many other things), telling me that plastidip is basically just colored glue. The liquified petroleum gas is probably the propellant, the naptha, Heptane, and MEK are the ones they use to dissolve the rubber they use, and the other two are likely to keep the dyes they used in suspension until the product is sprayed.
If you are OK with having lots of really not great chemicals at your house, get some VM&P Naptha, Heptane, and MEK (Naptha and MEK are paint thinners, read the back of the can, and Heptane can be found in small amounts in gasoline), some gloves (not nitrile. Use latex, natural rubber, or butyl gloves) and go to town. Don’t dump the resultant colored glue down the sewer, let it evaporate off of whatever tub you capture it in and throw the remaining rubber in the garbage. Oh, and don’t get it on your tires, because it’ll immediately and permanently ruin them.
Remember everyone, glue is just thick paint.
Out of curiosity, how did you find the SDS for this? After reading the article I did search for it, granted it was from my phone and only for 10 minutes, but couldn’t find it. Usually they’re trivially easy to find but I guess I haven’t had to look one up in almost a year.
Companies buy a subscription to a software product called Hazmin. I know because I work in a software field and someone I know was directly responsible for creating the software.
I usually just put it into google/duckduckgo, and most of the time that’ll pull it up. They have one SDS for all the colors of their spray cans.
MEK is a great suggestion. However, I might just skip the naptha and heptane. I suggested xylene in a later post because I ‘think’ of it as being less nasty than MEK, but in truth, I’m not really sure.
I’m a fan of sealed soaking so that the chemicals can do the cooking.
Yeah any solvents you buy in big cans at the paint store fall under the “not very good for you” category, so I treat them all the same. The less contact you have with them the better, a good long soak will usually work pretty well, it just takes longer.
How much time have you spent on it? What is your time worth?
How much did you spend at the car wash?
$40 does seem like a lot for a product like that. But from another perspective, it’s not that much.
Can’t you just have them bead blasted and be done with it? It would probably be a better pre-paint prep anyhow.
Sandblasting or bead blasting won’t work on plasti dip or other rubbery stuff because the media bounces off.
That’s a good point, I’ve never actually tried it on PlastiDip, so I don’t know for sure, but I’ve used it to remove stuff similar to automotive undercoating and it worked. It took a little while, but still better than scraping by hand. I’m thinking it might work, especially since the coating on those wheels seems pretty thin.
David, you’re new at this. You just have to put the wheel within reach of Delmar and tell him not to peel it.
Or wait a few years and offer pocket money for getting the job done.
Once my brothers and I were old enough to hold a paint brush, I don’t think my dad ever painted another fence until we left home.
That’ll only get you so far. You also gotta not quite catch him in the act and hit him from another room with a “Delmar Not His Real Name Tracy, what are you doing?” That’ll speed him up and get it done quick. Without that step, he’ll probably leave it half-finished.
Fight fire with fire. How about more plasti-dip? Just go all in on a thic horribly applied layer of it. Let it dry and then go to town peeling that?
That works OK, but if they’ve been baking in the sun for a while the second layer usually won’t have enough solvent to properly adhere to the lower layer, so when you go to peel it off the lower layer won’t come with, at least when I tried that.
Ohh, that is a good point, I never thought about it not reactivating and bonding. Then I think I’d suggest saving these rims for about 8-9 more years and then employing the child labor method of removal. This is why we have kids right?
“Then I saw a little peeling, and figured I’d pell the rest off.”
Interesting typo. Does that count towards your promotional product placement quota?
Why don’t you try putting it in your dishwasher?
If you’re about to replace your dishwasher in the next few days please try this and document every detail such as what chemical ruined what seal, what toasted the bearings, what caught on fire, etc. You know, for science.
That poor macerator.
… or the oven. What could go wrong?
“Then I saw a little peeling, and figured I’d pell the rest off.”
That’s your problem, you are trying to pell it off instead of peel it off.
Aren’t those SN95, not Fox, wheels? I recall them mostly on mid-level ’94-’95 models.
Yes, this. Foxes were 4-lug (with the exception of the 1993 Cobra R, and the SVO turbo 4 cylinders).
Those are SN95.
Well then I stand corrected!
I think we can chill out a bit, if you can swap in an IRS from a 2004 Mustang Cobra in to a late 1970s Fairmont… they’re all Fox platforms, I don’t really care about the alphabet soup names.
Are we going to call an XJ from 1984 and 2001 two completely different vehicles? Or an SJ from the 1960s vs. 1991?
Woah woah woah… just gonna breeze past the Mark VII and Continental 5 lugs? Sheesh….haha jk
$40 seems like a great buy. It’s not just time you’d save, but all that frustration and irritation also. The name makes it sound purpose-made for this exact scenario; is it made by the same company?
I have never heard of Plasti-Dip, but it sounds like it’s pretty handy stuff! I can’t imagine spraying it on wheels though.
Lots of people also coat tool handles with it. It makes a bare metal wrench a lot easier to grip
The purpose of spraying wheels (and indeed cars) with it is to be able to peel it off, it lets you play around with different colors and if you don’t like them, you can just un-paint the car/wheels. Also good for resale value, as buyers are often wary of cars in non-original colors. That is, as long as you don’t leave it on for several years and let it become brittle.
Spend the $40. I’ve had to remove Plasti Dip from a car before and no amount of Goo Gone, acetone, heat, and scraping made it easy. Just buy the dissolver that works and save yourself some time.
I look at it like this: if my non-work hours were paid at the same rate as my work hours, will something like that cost more or less than the time investment? If it breaks even or costs less, I buy it. Sometimes I still do even if it costs more due to the headaches it saves.
Time is the one thing we never get more of. I can always go make more money.
You got the wrong solvents! The sds sheet of the dip dissolver is 80-95% d-Limonene, which is the “environmentally ok” version of MEK, which is one of the solvents in plastidip. If you ever need to get glue off of something (and it isn’t CA glue) the SDS will tell you if it’s a water-based/latex glue, or a solvent-based glue. Solvent based glues always have hazardous materials in them, which are usually the solvents, so you can just go buy that from the hardware store (it’ll be paint thinner, just make sure it’s the right solvent) and save $30 in the future.
Interestingly, Goo Gone has some d-Limonene in it as well, which is where some of the citrusy smell comes from. Goo Gone is only 3-5% d-Limonene, and the rest is petroleum distillates (which could be a bunch of different things).
I hate to say this, but I love the smell of goo gone.
Me too, it does smell pretty good haha. The dangers of working in a chemical plant are many, but people never mention the possibility you’ll like the smell.
I probably did, but I had a heat gun, an old credit card, Goo Gone, and acetone for what I THOUGHT was going to be a ten minute job that became several hours. I was too annoyed at that point to think clearly.
The same also holds true for the unsightly dealer sticker on that car, but someone did me the service of totaling it a month later anyway, after I’d given up on that.
Or possibly it was the chemical fumes.
Yeah finding the right solvents is super strange, because sometimes the “wrong solvents” will work just fine and sometimes the “right solvents” don’t do squat, it’s a bit of a trick.
FWIW, I removed the plastidip on an old set of wheels using wd-40 long before I knew this information, which took two days, so I feel your pain.
Your post needs more visibility. This is great information!
I agree on the time investment calculation. I figure if it’s something that will take me two or three times as long as a professional I may break even.
I think in this case David has to factor in how much of a post he can develop from the time invested. That would alter the equation a little bit. $40 still seems like a good investment though and it would be great for the readers to know if it’s a good investment.
David, if you are reading this, You have three other wheels. Maybe you can try three different methods and write it up…
I would honestly try brake fluid. It will pull paint off of plastic. I used to use it in my car model days when I needed to do a reshoot. For plastic parts you soak over night. For wheels, you may be able to apply liberally and let that sit overnight. Then brush and power wash.