I have a lot of rubber roadbed, and decided For my American Flyer S gauge layout, I had set aside some dealer cartons of rubber roadbed, but I also had some nice flexible black roadbed that had brown paint on it.
Figuring that if I could use get the paint off the used roadbed, I could sell the dealer cartons, I tried cleaning them with oven cleaner. It worked very well.
Before I start - aluminum reacts to oven cleaner.
Never use oven cleaner with anything made of aluminum. Here's a video on removing paint from 1950s vintage American Flyer Rubber roadbed using oven cleaner and a brush.
I also did pictures of each step.
Here's the roadbed as I got it:
I found the Walmart oven cleaner worked much better than the dollar store grill cleaner. I had to respray and soak a few of the pieces I used dollar store spray on.
I put a trash bag into a plastic garbage can and then wearing a rubber glove I sprayed each peice with oven cleaner and put it into the bag.
Actually,
after spraying two sections I stopped and set up a fan to blow away the fumes from the oven cleaner. Then I went back to spraying them and putting them into the bag:
I filled the bucket up, and then tied the bag shut. Tying the bag keeps the oven cleaner from evaporating too fast. It allows it to work longer.
After waiting overnight, I opened the bag and took out the sections. Each was scrubbed as needed with a brush. Here's some pictures of a section as I clean it:
From Bucket:
Uncleaned:
Half scrubbed:
The stiff green brush worked better than the softer yellow brush. I think the green brush came attached to a mop.
Final result:
After scrubbing each section I put it into a sink of water and rinsed it well. Then I put the roadbed into a plastic tub and poured off the water. I set the tub on the patio. It's 115 degrees outside today so it quickly dried.
Once they are dried, I looked at each section. Some had small specks that I picked off with a fingernail. A few sections didn't come clean so I repeated the process shown above on them.
This rubber roadbed will look great on my
American Flyer S gauge layout.
