Removing Sharpie Marker from Plastic

Hello Chad, Perhaps you hadn't read the entire thread on this? Part of the previous messages was about getting Sharpie marker off plastic. That's what I said I've used the alcohol / comet paste on. You'd have to ask the gun experts. I'd never heard of this Hoppe's Powder Solvent before. It wasn't I that was advocating it's use. But if I ever have some, I'd be willing to give it a try just to see how it did. But at the present time, already having a proven effective method of cleaning the Sharpie off plastic with commonly available materials already at hand, I don't yet have the need to run out and get any of the Hoppe's Powder. On something like a huge monitor, the marking were generally on the top of the bezel. I'd cleaned / smoothed the top, stopping at the corners and it looked acceptably ok when it was done. The corners provided a transition point from being smooth on the top to textured on the sides. Sometimes the parts are worth enough to put a lot of time into it, and sometimes they're not. As monitors declined in value, the time available to clean or refurbish them also had to correspondingly be reduced. Part of it also depends on how much spare time you have, and what value you place on that time. The time it took to clean a monitor as I describe below was only something I could do in times past. With monitor values having declined to where they are now, I could only do this cleaning for one I was going to use myself these days. I stopped selling any monitors a long time ago, and now excess ones only go to scrap. But ... If you have an old 13" or 14" VGA monitor you've picked up at uni or gov't surplus, if it's an average small size PC monitor, it's not worth a whole lot these days, so you wouldn't be risking much to experiment on it. My method was to take the back casing off the monitor and clean it up in the bath. Squirt straight dishwashing liquid on a scrub brush, the sprinkle comet on heavily to get a paste, then scrub. It scrubs the sharpie marker off very very well. Then either let it dry overnight, or blow dry with air. On the body of the monitor, since it couldn't go into the bath and get soaked, I used the alcohol on a white paper towel and got off as much as I could. Then I wet another paper towel with alcohol, sprinkled on comet, and scrubbed. The alcohol comet paste scrubs the Sharpie marking off very well. When I cleaned monitors this way, when I was done, they were so clean, even though they started out dirty and marked up, when done, they looked like they just came right out of the box new. The 20" Sony I'm sitting here in front of right at the moment was done this way. The results were perfect. The texture was not disturbed in any noticeable way. You can choose to disbelieve, or you can give it a try. Your choice. At 02:57 AM 5/16/03 -0400, you wrote: