French Socotel Acetone Clean Up - photos

[FABphones]

I've a couple of ABS phones that really are in need of an exterior refurb. Sunbleaching and bleach soaking were amongst the choices to do this but having read (thoroughly) a thread on here about Acetone ABS clean up (Teleplay, good one, thanks), I decided to go with that.

This French Socotel phone was originally two tone grey but had discoloured and was extremly yellow - no actually it was orangey brown in places. A previous owner was a seriously heavy smoker.

For stage 3 I was going to try using T-Cut type paint cutter, but I didn't have any so I tried Brasso but I didn't like that, in this instance it just seemed to rub an orange colour back on so I went with Novus 3, then down to Novus 2 for the final polish up. The T-Cut is on order to try out for the next one.

Following the instructions on the above mentioned thread, this is my adapted version. Three steps:

1) Acetone brisk 'wipe over' - changing the lint-free cloth constantly
2) Acetone (75%) and Meths (25%) mixture brisk 'wipe over'  - again, changing the lint-free cloth constantly
3) Polish and buff with Novus - using yet another nice clean cloth

The phone is now the same colour on the outside as on the inside.

*And yes, that really is the same phone in that last side by side pic! 

Before and after:

[.....]

Great job, looks good.

[HarrySmith]

Nice!

[twocvbloke]

Nice job there...

As for the yellowing itself, it's not really smokers that cause the yellowing, it's the plastic itself reacting to UV light, hence why you get the "shadowing" (where "hidden" areas of the phone retain the colour, but others turn yellow), usually it's the fire retardants in plastic that does it, but it depends on the plastic type...

The easiest and cheapest way to de-yellow plastics is a warm peroxide bath, I don't recall the exact numbers with regards to mixing peroxide with water, but it's actually incredible how easily yellowing can be removed with just a tub of water and a sunny day...

A good example of that is here, a Commodore VIC-20 going from nasty to not bad:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_rjjCkcXknE

[FABphones]

Thanks all. 

Thanks 2cv, realise about the UV, but if you'd have smelt it and seen inside the mouthpiece you'd know why I mentioned the smoking. 

Still, all done. Now I can move on to the next.

[twocvbloke]

Thanks 2cv, realise about the UV, but if you'd have smelt it and seen inside the mouthpiece you'd know why I mentioned the smoking. 

Well, there's no hiding from the stink of years old built-up tobacco smoke film, nasty stuff!!!

[andy1702]

You made a good job of that. I did a grey GPO 741 the same way. The beauty of this technique is it also takes out small scratches and other blemishes as you're effectively liquifying the plastic and removing the top layer. For some reason grey seems to be one of the worst colours for fading, turning that khaki brown colour.