Removing the Silver Paint


lunarwhale

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Jan 8, 2015
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I've had my Pandora for a little over a year now. I wasn't terribly thrilled with the paint job on mine - some obvious dust under the coating (including a small strand of hair), a bit uneven in some places - and it's gotten a bit worse with the more or less daily wear it receives. I'm in need of a little hands-on project to keep myself sane in between studying for exams and was wondering if anyone has any experience removing the paint. I've been going at it in a few places with a scouring pad and it doesn't look that bad, but it's not an ideal solution (both because it takes forever and doesn't produce the most even results).

Has anyone had better luck with either sanding or some sort of chemical solution?
 
Interesting. I'll give sandpaper a go next. Worst case I guess is that it doesn't look great and I replace the case.
 
So, to report back with how this went:

Oh my god don't do this. Maybe I'm just awful at sanding but it really does not work well. It just ends up scratching the plastic underneath to hell and back and looks horrible (not to mention feels bad). I kind of expected this, but it was worth trying.

On the (tangentially related) upside, got a new case after I screwed this up. Paint job's much better and the hinge is tight - slightly worried that this may be due to the LCD cable or wireless cable being in there too tight and causing friction, but we'll cross that bridge when we get there. Struggling to find a couple of screws to fit it right (didn't come with them and two in my old case are sort of stuck in place).

Frankly I'm surprised that the LCD cable survived the process. It was looking a bit beat up by the end.
 
Yeah, that's how sanding works - by scratching everything to hell. That's why you use a progression of finer and finer grains - start off with a heavy grain to cut through the majority of the way, then use finer and finer grains to undo the damage you caused by using a heavy grade paper. Usually for something like this you take it all the way down to polishing it finally.
 
Yeah, I admittedly gave up after 320 grit or so. Just got too concerned about how it was going. If I get around to picking up some more sandpaper soon I'll continue and see how it goes, but at the moment I'm fairly happy with my current case.
 
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