How do you remove white basecoat overspray on black trim?

[StreetKlean]

Question?

How do you remove white basecoat overspray on black trim?

[Mike Phillips]

Hi StreetKlean,

You posted the below question

How about base coat overspray on black trim?

To this thread...


The Baggie Test - How to inspect for above surface bonded contaminants


Nothing wrong with this but what's better is to simply start your own thread because your question is a very unique issue.


In your PM to me you explained this is a customer car.

This is a very challenging problem because anything strong enough to dissolve white basecoat paint, (as part of a basecoat/clearcoat paint job), is typically going to be strong enough to harm or visually damage the trim at the same time.


I don't know what solvent can safely dissolve cured, dried basecoat paint off of exterior black plastic trim and moldings. This could be a case of telling the customer to go back to the shop that painted their car and made this mistake in the first place to FIX IT. And that might mean replacing all the trim.

Besides that, my good friend Renny Doyle wrote a book on how to start a detailing business. He asked me and few other guys to provide some real-world experiences for his book. One of the section I wrote was about how to simple TURN WORK DOWN.

Simply put - there are some jobs that come your way and come my way that are more trouble than they are worth. The word worth can also mean profitable. What I said in Renny's book was you need to know when to turn work down and let someone else have the blessing.


Here's my article on this topic,


The learned skill of turning detailing work down by Mike Phillips



Sorry if that's not the answer you're looking for but without pictures showing the extent of the damage I can only use my imagination and assume and I hate assuming when I simply don't have more info. So imagining white basecoat paint - that I'm guessing has dried and cured - on black plastic trim and probably the WORST kind of black plastic trim - PEBBLE TEXTURED BLACK PLASTIC TRIM - sounds like an impossible job simply because removing it will be difficult if the goal is to remove it WIHTOUT damaging the trim that it's on.