The best thing to do, and actually the most "correct" from a restoration standpoint, is to paint the plastic. Paint can always be removed. William Donzelli aw288 at osfn.org

Some of the new environmentally safe strippers are pretty safe for plastic. Also, good old brake fluid works, as long as it does not contact the plastic for more than a couple hours. This is what the train model geeks do when they want to strip a model. William Donzelli aw288 at osfn.org

That strikes me as being a pretty meaningless statement!. There are dozens of different plastics, what is safe for one may not be safe for another (as a trivial example, propanone (acetone) attacks many common plastics, but AFAIK it doesn't attack PTFE). There is a second problem, though. The stripper may appear safe when you use it, but may cause chemical changes in the plastic that make it go very brittle, or something like that. I've seen a similar effect with mineral oils on certain plastics. Seems OK for a bit, then it all starts to fall apart. -tony

Tony> That strikes me as being a pretty meaningless statement!. There Tony> are dozens of different plastics, what is safe for one may not Tony> be safe for another (as a trivial example, propanone (acetone) Tony> attacks many common plastics, but AFAIK it doesn't attack Tony> PTFE). I don't think anything short of molten sodium or fluorine gas bothers PTFE. There are other surprises. Ethanol (plain old alcohol) is a rather mild solvent that bothers very few things. But it wrecks plexiglas (lucite). paul

I haven't tried it yet (on plastic that is) but sudsy ammonia or just strait ammonia does wonders at removing paint and grime from metals. I bought an old lathe several years ago that had 100+ years of rock hard paint and crud stuck to it. I soaked it in sudsy ammonia for 2 nights and it came off readily with some sort of brush. I may try soaking the plastic in some for a short period of time and note the effect. Although pretty caustic, I can't see it having a detrimental effect on the plastic as long as you don't overdo it. __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com

Hi, Mike, *********** REPLY SEPARATOR *********** On 24-Jun-05 at 09:23 Mike Loewen wrote: Ha! I love it when I can self-plug! ;-) Extensive listings and (admittedly biased) reviews of Bay Area surplus places may be found here: http://www.bluefeathertech.com/technoid/calswapindex.html Halted is pretty good for small components in terms of both price and selection. However, BEWARE their test gear area. It is, for the most part, grossly overpriced and undervalued, and it has been that way for many years. I see that you're involved with a robot builder's club. That being the case, Triangle Machine & Tool will likely be of particular interest to you. Happy hunting. I'll be following in your footsteps in the first part of September. -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Bruce Lane, Owner & Head Hardware Heavy, Blue Feather Technologies -- http://www.bluefeathertech.com kyrrin (at) bluefeathertech do/t c=o=m "If Salvador Dali had owned a computer, would it have been equipped with surreal ports?"

There's a place that I love called Mike Quinn's , in Oakland, on Adams Street; which basically is 1/4 mile East of Hegenberger & Adams. To be precise, it's exactly 1 1/2 miles south-east of the Oakland Airport. Basically, it's a graveyard for everything - and there's not a price tag in the place - so everything is negotiatable; Don't spend time asking for what the prices are - this makes them mad. And don't call - even if they have a part, they'll tell you no. BUT it's a goldmine for EVERYTHING you can imagine, from old 40XX and 74XX logic components, to MFM drives, power supplies, PCs, RS-232 terminals, and testing equipment. Last time I was there, they just received about 80 machines Silicon Graphics machines from the folks at (un-named local graphics shop for movie industry). The drives were flashed with the OS only. Okay, so there's a lot of stuff there. I have very often brought them stuff, and only gone back to re-purchase it later on (heh...) or in the case that I picked up some nice parts from Quinn's, and put on ebay, they were bought by a Rusiian Aerospace Company, which they responded quite frustratingly when they discovered that I had written out a "Materials Manifest" when sending them to Russia via U.S. Postal Service on the Customs Declarations. "High Quality Milled Aluminum Parts for ??? Purpose". Now, a lot of people won't tell you about Quinn's electronics , because it's sort of a secret place that people like to go - and because it's reasonable, but it's really the most awesome place I have ever gone to in the bay area for electronics. Aaron -----Original Message----- From: Mark Davidson <medavidson at mac.com> To: "General Discussion: On-Topic Posts Only" <cctech at classiccmp.org> Cc: cctalk at classiccmp.org Date: Sun, 3 Jul 2005 17:33:12 -0700 Subject: Re: Surplus in Silicon Valley

On Mon, 20 Jun 2005, [ISO-8859-1] Bj?rn Vermo wrote: So,... is it possible to make a UBIK that can handle most of the case plastics?