Just back from a quick trip to Glasgow, to see Stiff Little Fingers at The Barrowlands and to visit a couple of suppliers to a company that I do some freelance work for... feeling a little hungover.

louise2cv: That white one might have been a bit before my time, cos I was living in Birmingham until 2005. There were a couple of wollies up Newfield Road in Hagley, but both their chassis collapsed so they were cannibalised and then turned into a Pembleton, which can been seen out and about on nice sunny days. I've had a go in it. Great fun to drive: nice and low (much nicer than a Lomax) so 40mph feels like 80!

Squeezebox: gawd knows how the kids named a white car with Tintin associations "Snowy". I just don't understand how kids' minds work!

It's not the only 2CV with the name of Snowy

Should be called Milou.

The weather's nice this morning, so I made an excuse to bask in the sun by stripping my replacement rear wings (well, one of them anyway).

Here's what I did:
1 can of Nitromors + an old brush + v thick rubber gloves:
1 D0lly wing, in good condition:

To save on a crappy clearing up job after (and getting moaned at) I did the job over an old box, to collect the old paint:

Applied Nitromors in jabbing motion, working on smallish area (30cmx30cm) at a time. After doing the first area, applied some to another 30x30 area, then another and so on...

After the first area had had 5 mins for the Nitromors to start blistering, I jabbed some more into the paint and left it for another 5 mins or so. THEN I get a course metal scourer (actually a metal dish scourer, bought from Lidl) and simply scrubbed. Where paint didn't come off, I just jabbed some more Nitromors on and left that bit alone for 5 mins. Meanwhile, I scrubbed away at the bits that were keen to come off. Didn't use any water whilst scrubbing, but if the Nitromors dried out, I just jabbed a bit more onto the paint.
After 10 mins of scrubbing, my old box was full of this:

... and after I'd chucked a bucket of water over the wing to remove the last bits of crud, my wing looked like this:

Result! No deep gouges or blemishes to deal with before painting, other than the odd ding picked up by the wing in its previous life, of course.

Time taken for job: 45 leisurely minutes.

Wow. I am surprised - and impressed.

I was expecting "After 3 hours with burnt and blistered hands, I f***in' gave up and threw the b****d out..."

The top tip here for anyone else trying this is the thick gloves. Nitromors is particularly good for remodelling skin too. Might work on a tattoo if anyone wants to try and report back. [please don't]

I got some elbow-length superstrength ones, which look like the kind of things that a 1950s B-Movie mad scientist might use. Really, don't scrimp on the skin protection. Once you have the right gloves this job is a bit of a doddle.

WOW,

Amazing that you can get a D*lly wing to look that good in only 45 minutes...and some paint stripper....now you are seriously giving me some ideas.....could apply this technique to the whole car !!!

Why not just laquer it...it looks great like that !

The bits you were left with remind me of last nights pizza

Was the paint that was on the wing original paint?
Which Nitromors did you use?

Original paint, definitely. The wings had sat in a garage for 5 years or so, following their redundancy (the car was turned into a Pembleton).

I used this Nitromors:

Didn't scrimp on the Nitromors, and followed the instructions closely, taking care to jab/stipple the stuff in, and not to "brush it out". Also, made sure that I kept the Nitromors wet (by jabbing more in if it was drying) and resisted the temptation to start scrubbing before the paint was good and bubbling.

Finally, and this is important, I used the metal Lidl scourer

precisely because it is not too densely packed, which means that it doesn't get clogged up. Using steel wool is frustrating, because it just gets bunged up with gunky melted paint.

Oh, and invest in some serious heavy duty gloves.

They range in price from a couple of quid to £15 for the ones in the pic, but they last forever and they're great for all those ghastly jobs that nobody likes to do, like... err... you know.