Remove paint from bricks

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What is the best way to remove paint from brickwork please? I mean ordinary red bricks. The paint could be gloss or emulsion. I mean small amounts due to splashing, dripping, or graphitti. Thanks
 
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try the cheap stuff first like Nitromorse.
 
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Nitromors is an option, but it's not the cheapest. Paramose is available from toolstation.com in 5l cans and it's cheap. The cost of a 5l can means you'll get free next day delivery too.

I've distilled Paramose and it has a lot of dichloromethane in it, which is the solvent that dissolves paints. Paint stripper is basically that solvent mixed with things to make it gel and stick to vertical surfaces better, as pure DCM is runnier than water and will boil off almost immediately.

The stench and burning feeling is the solvent as well. One thing that worries me is that I buy pure DCM from laboratory supplies and it'i now considered toxic and is showing possible carcinogenic properties. Paint stripper is usually about 40-70% DCM. Using litres of it inside the house, where it's warm and enclosed, seems like a potentially bad idea. It won't kill you straight off, or immediately give you cancer, but neither does smoking. I'm sure some of the older guys will remember Benzene, a very handy solvent that was used extensively. Then they discovered that it was also fairly carcinogenic, and a huge quantity of people had been using it on a daily basis without the masks needed to block it; because no one knew it was a risk.

I wouldn't use stripper myself, it tends to smear and people quite often make mistakes with it and waste tons, get it all over themselves, make a mess or have subsequent paints blister back off.

Other options;

Hydrochloric based brick cleaner.

A pressure washer. You will want a turbo nozzle or a sandblasting nozzle. The turbos produce a tiny beam of water which digs in, but the beam spins in a cone shape to cover more area - it really does work very well. It also sounds like a spitfire is strafing people all day overhead, as the jet is spun by a tiny BB in the tip that flicks around as the water goes through, producing a "bbbbbbrrrrrrrrrr" noise in the jet. I think you will probably want to go with a sandblasting nozzle though, as thick, caked on, old paint may be a struggle for the turbo nozzle.

Failing that, check out toolstation again and buy a twisted wire cup for an angle grinder. I've used a 75mm one in a 3hp grinder and it will rip anything like paint or silicone off the brick to get it ready for use again.

The silicone thing is particularly useful when doing new PVC frames, as silicone WILL NOT stick to it's self. If you leave bits on the brick (taking it off with a knife etc), the seal is likely to go wonky over time. The wire cup and angle grinder method will get every single bit of it off in about one minute for the entire opening, and the brick will be so clean the stuff will rebond like a mother.

Look at it this way, a can of stripper will be £20-30. And it may make things worse or not be enough. Spend a bit more, you get the sandblasting nozzle / wire brush for keeps and can use it on other things.

The standard method for the council guys dealing with this is air blasting with grit. Given the amount of safety gear that needs, the airborne dust, the huge compressor and the noise, I'd go with wet sand blasting. The noise of those air ones really is unreal. They were doing it for weeks near my old secondary school and I could hear the jet from about half a mile away. Up close, it was an unbearable ear piercing whistle.
 
johnheritage,

Out of interest would you not be concerned that using abrasive methods such as grit blasting could damage the face of the bricks and reduce their weatherproofing if they are external?

I have to remove some paint from external brickwork myself and have purchased some testers of chemical strippers including some from the link posted above in this topic. I was shying away from grit blasting due to worries about damage to the bricks as they are on the front lower elevation of my house.

Talking of Benzene and risks etc, how about that good old degreaser Carbon Tetrachloride, used in tanks to degrease metal etc, poor souls working with it without protection also took the linings off their insides with it. Great for removing grease though, I used to clean my motor cycle chains with it and they came out sparkling. The list goes on, Chloroform, Toluene, Pyridine.........

Rgds
Jack
 
Chloroform isn't too bad, provided you're not knocked out. Xylene and toluene, I'm not away of any major health risks.

But pyridine. The drug labs LOVE the stuff, so it's a watched material now. If you tried ordering a few litres of that with a dodgy account from a lab supplier, you'd likely get a police visit at 4am whilst your in your undercrackers - and they'll wreck the front door on the way in. :D

Brickwork, it depends how close you go with the lance. Start far off and move closer until the paint is coming off in a controlled way. The paint should come off long before the brick / concrete goes.

Water jets can be used to cut ceramic / aerospace steel, but those use ridiculously high pressures (waaaay more than even the industrial washer do as normal), tiny sapphire or diamond needle nozzles and the jet is right against the material, and moves slowly shooting out fine aluminium oxide or some other hard grit. A wet / air blasting method is more like gently sanding the crud off the surface rather than cutting into it. But mind the mortar lines if you're going up really close.

The weatherproofing effect of brick is only due to the rain hitting it and running down the side, then the brick surface drying off when the rain stops. There's no special coating near their surfaces to wear off.

The damp issues where you can mess things up is mainly due to puncturing the damp course, when digging or drilling down, and other linings are usually applied inside the cavity or inside the house. For example, in damp basements, they'll coat the entire insides with 1,3 Butadiene. It's next to the PVA and admixes in the building places, and costs more than PVA because it won't water down again so easily once it's dry. It STINKS of new carpets, I think they use a similar rubber as the backing on carpets. Anyway, by painting the entire thing, it's like putting a continuous, no seams, pond liner all over the room. It's called tanking. But, unless you blast through the walls to the inside of the house, that's not coming back off.

The council using them means they know it's not going to wreck the waterproofing / surface.

The most annoying thing may be that the area you clean will look extremely clean by the end of things, so you'll probably need to do the rest of the walls to get them to match. E.g. when they blast off graffiti, that spot will end up sparkling clean, whilst the rest is filthy.
 
johnheritage,

Thanks for the explanation re the bricks, I had thought that the outward facing surface had some type of glaze on it making it more weatherproof than the non exposed face. However, that was just my assumption having not been able to see the brick faces due to paint. My next door neighbours bricks where they are unpainted seem to have a smoothish face, however, I would need to get up close to have a good look. The area I propose to remove the paint from is the ground floor front elevation of the property, the rest is all rendered so hopefully, there will be no clean/filthy contrast.

Going back to organic solvents, apart from the monitored ones such as pyridine, would you know if they are readily available to the general public in the UK from suppliers. I could do with a few winchesters of acetone, ethyl acetate, isopropyl alcohol and n-hexane for some general use but have not really looked into sourcing them.


Rgds
Jack
 
Acetone, you can buy from eBay. There was a guy on there selling it at 99%+ last time I checked.

I have 25l of it, that I use for cleaning PVC frames and varnishes off things. It works GREAT on PVC for wiping stains off. A few minutes of wiping and the whole thing will look brand new again. I now don't bother masking off PVC and just paint onto it, then wipe the paint off once the walls are dry. Quicker and neater.

Ethyl Acetate shows up SOMETIMES as bottles of acetone free nail polisher remover. That's basically CP grade ethyl acetate.

IPA, you can easily get that from eBay. It's also sold for cleaning white boards or getting marker pens back off school desks. My chemistry teacher had it in a squirty bottle and would go round spritzing the desks mid theory discussion. :D Electronics places, like Maplin, sell it for cleaning PCBs as well.

Dichloromethane is a great solvent for really ripping organic material out of things. It's easy to redistill from paint stripper. But acetone will usually work as well and it's far easier to buy it in 99%+ purity bottles than messing around with paint stripper is.

n-hexane is trickier. That used to be in chewing gum remover, I'm not sure if it still is.

I have cyclohexane, but it came from a genuine, account style, laboratory supplier.

Generally, if you need hexane / cyclohexane, there is a good chance Toluene / Xylene will work fine as well. Cyclohexane / xylene / toluene are all the same ring shapes, the latter two just have a methyl or two stuck on. Since there's no functional groups pulling electrons around, they all have essentially zero polarity. You need to be doing something odd for the extra methyls to be any problem. But you can buy those two as paint thinners / brush cleaners in a CP pure state.

Toluene seems to be being phased out. I suspect, because TNT is nitrated toluene. You can't do that with xylene.

Acetone was also a concern because the guys blowing up planes were using liquid bombs where one component was acetone. Of coarse, that looks a lot like water, which is why you're not not allowed bottles full of liquids or gels in your hand luggage. Thank youtube for that as well, and all the tw*ts on there making bombs and pipe bombs, then complaining about terrorists blowing things up or things like columbine, were the two schoolkids had pipe bombs they'd made from a guide.

There is a VERY big difference between making a bit of nitrogen triiodide to make popping noises when people step on it and then packing a piece of steel pipe with high explosive and capping the ends. I'm all for zero censorship, but I do flag every single video I see on there that involves an explosive and piece of metal pipe. There's only one use for something like that, and it's a terrible one. There's a place for that kind of thing, but a site visited by tens of millions of teenagers for video guides is not one of them. For instance, you'd be a pretty bad parent if you're letting your kids watch 18 rated horror / abuse films. My mum was a primary school teacher, and I can assure you, many parents do that and then have their kids on mind altering, amphetamine based drugs like Ritalin when the results come back.

In terms of buying genuine Winchesters of solvents, most of the laboratory suppliers now won't even speak to the public, let alone give them an account. The new initiatives are to essentially restrict any access to any chemical that's not of everyday use or that can be done with an alternative. E.g. a new bill is on the way through to ban things like concentrated sulphuric for drains, along with numerous others. The lab suppliers will usually want to see a business bank account and a VAT number before you get an account.
 

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