How to " de grease " without removing paint.....its a science huh

[JimV]

One thing I am learning about this new hobby that I still cannot shake is to learn how to assess what you have. Well....actually it starts with making smarter buying or picking decisions so u have better grills to restore. Then once that grill is in your shop you have to assess the path you will take with this particular grill. So tonight's question is how do you degrease without removing paint...especially on a particularly sloppy external cook box? My guess is the guys that have done this a while give the grill one quick look and they know which way they are going. So there must be a tipping point to degrease or to get the wire wheel out and stripper down to metal.

Question #2
How much residue can be left behind and still have the high heat paint adhere????

So for me I would love to take my soft hand held wire brush and go over a piece several times with say Dawn or whatever in a circular motion to remove as much of the grease as I can. For the most part this cooked on grease is pretty tough so my preferred method is to take a grinder with a SOFT brush cup and sort of graze the piece while removing the grease residue which also gives the new paint something to bite on. I have been finishing with a method suggested here....using brake cleaner w acetone as my paint prepper. I spray the brake cleaner and wipe it quickly while it is still wet to remove any debris.....then after it dries completely I will paint.

Now I will include a pic of a sloppy cook box that I intend to fully restore and please give me your opinion on how you would prep this box for paint. If u want my opinion.....uhhhhh I will try my soft brush cup method and if it doesnt get the job done and too much residue is left behind I guess I will have to strip it back to metal.

Thanks for reading my ramble

 

[JimV]

Hi Ed....its weird I can see your reply in my email but not here on the site. Yes I am buying and selling grills. Not in any quantity to speak of but I always have one if the hopper or one that I am tinkering on. As far as flipping goes I still like to do my best work within reason on every grill that I touch. I take pride in everything I do. So I want my work to look nice and bubbling paint is not an option...nor is that streaky messy paint an option. I included a pic of the grill I am tinkering on now.

 

[Ed P]

Hey, JimV, wassup? Not so weird, because I replied and then I saw who it was I was replying to, so I knew the approach you were taking and I deleted my dumb-a$$ response. Sorry for the confusion.

 

[JimV]

No worries Ed..........as a rookie when I see one of the " bosses " sending a reply I actually get a little excited to read the response.....so I thought I got ripped off when I couldnt see ya!
So since u kind of replied.....why dont ya reply? Would u strip that cook box......or could you de grease and paint that cook box?

 

[Ed P]

I don't know how that could have shown up in your email! Maybe because of the offline convos we have had, I dunno. Do you have an RSS feed from TVWBB? Not even sure TVWBB has that available, but that might explain it.

You have two things going on here, Jim...that white stuff you see is aluminum "rust" (aluminum oxide), which means the paint that was supposed to protect the metal has failed. There are other areas where the paint is still intact, but the problem is the ALOx is powdery and brushes right off so you have to remove the powdery stuff and get down to bare metal. Grease and oil is a different animal altogether, probably a much bigger problem, depending on how bad it is. I don't see how you are going to be able to just de-grease and paint, but you want to be careful when de-greasing that you don't end up spreading the grease that's on the inside to the outside that's going to be painted...so if you wire brush the inside maybe you want to set aside a cup brush for use solely on the outside.

Apart from that, paint needs "tooth" to grab hold of, and that's why sandblasting is the near-perfect surface prep. I go directly from the sandblast cabinet to paint and don't ever touch the sandblasted surface with my bare hands to avoid contamination. I just blow it off to get any remaining dust off and paint it. If it's not a good time for paint, I leave it in the cabinet until it is, then maybe give it a quick once-over if it looks like it's oxidizing. But you can't take it into the cabinet until it is thoroughly de-greased, so you have to have a convenient method for doing that.

I just don't see an easy way of doing this, especially for a grill that you are selling or giving to someone else. Maybe it would better to take the parts that are to be painted to a sandblaster, especially if it's a one-stop process where he does the cleaning/de-greasing for you, but you have to figure the economics of the whole thing and see if you can make any money by paying for that. Now if it was a "forever" grill, you probably wouldn't mind spending hundreds of dollars on a resto, but for a flip grill, that's a horse of a different color.

 

[Ed P]

Thought you might like to see an old sandblasting pic...this is from the early '70s, and that's my wife blasting away at our '41 Ford Panel truck. We rented the equipment, living in a rented house, used up 1400# of sand at the end of the day. She was having a hard time managing that heavy air hose, as I remember...you know the cartoons with the hose taking off with the person holding it? Funny.

Dumb-a$$ kids, I'm tellin' ya.

 

[JimV]

Love the pics thanks for sharing. Your wife is a trooper! I took a vid of my wife buffing out the pontoons of our pontoon boat. I set her up with the high speed buffer and some 3m rubbing compound and she was off to the races! Of course I had to re do all of her work but she gets an E for effort.
I tell ya......there is a body shop right next door to my 2 work warehouses where I do all of my tinkering. I might just ask a guy to ask a guy who knows a guy that does sand blasting cause I really dislike grinding out cook boxes. That same box I pictured last night was the one I went after today.......it was just a mess and didnt want to clean up nicely like some do. I had a k95 mask on under my respirator.....a neck gator......long sleeves....a face shield......and a Weber apron on... I must have looked like a complete idiot! In the end I got the inside of the box clean although its not the good kind of clean...but its aluminum clean. I also grazed the exterior of the box with "the dirty " brush cup only because I was at the ahhhhh F it stage of frustration. The grazing part went pretty well but still removed paint in places. The exterior of the cook box cleaned up pretty nice. I had no intention of stripping all of the paint off of this cook box as it wasnt coming off easily......there must be some secret that I am missing when it comes to stripping OEM paint off of cook boxes easily...cause for me....it doesnt just come right off....its a slow process. Maybe its the grinder i have been using at my shop vs the new Harbor Freight grinder I got for my home garage who knows....will try it next time...its a beast!
Before I left the shop I experimented again with rolling on high heat with a 1/2 nap roller to create texture and reduce flashing on the bare spots..........it looked good before I left......I will check it tomorrow and toss on coat number 2. I forgot to de fuzz the damn roller again and got a bunch of fuzz in my paint....but my theory is that roller fuzz is basically plastic and it will melt when I do a burn off......I will report back.
Ps....if you are zooming in and such on the pics.....that is not the actual grill frame its a donor I use as a grinding stand.......also not I only painted portions of the box trying different methods with the roller.