Latex House Paint???

[1BadMach1]

My girlfriends father was pulling into his garage the other night and ran the side of his van up against a support pole for his porch. It took the paint off the pole and "smeared" it up the side of the van. The paint is stuck on the side of van and is thick as can be. What can I use to get the paint off the side of his van. I'm sure there are going to be some pretty bad scratches under the house paint, but I'll deal with them later. The area of the paint is probable 8 or 9 inches high and probable a foot long and it is just covered.

[Alfisti]

I'm not sure what our equivalent is in Australia, but if latex paint is waterbased its might be similar to our Acrylic or PVA. If that's the case then methylated spirits (an alcohol) can disolve it without removing automotive paint. Mind you, old dried waterbased paint will disolve very slowly.

Can't hurt to try...seems its big enough to not touch the cars paint...you'll need to saturate the surface.

Hope this helps.

[1BadMach1]

Thanks for the info, I will give that a try tonight

[Mike Phillips]

This can be difficult depending on the paint, but besides your fingernail to physically chip the paint off, you could also try a paint cleaner like ScratchX and piece of terry cloth towel, this has worked for me in the past.

Mike

[1BadMach1]

Thanks Mike, I'll give it a whirl. I detailed my girlfriends car last week and now her family thinks I can clean this and make it look better than new. I have some bad news for them.

[mirrorfinishman]

Re: Latex House Paint???

Originally posted by 1BadMach1
The paint is stuck on the side of van and is thick as can be. What can I use to get the paint off the side of his van.

I would certainly not recommend using an alcohol based product. It would be much safer to use a paint cleaner like ScratchX.

I have personally had good results using a product called Goof Off followed by #6 Cleaner Wax. Here's a link to the Goof Off site; http://www.valspar.com/val/resident/goof-off.jsp