De gunging stainless steel

[DAPPH]

The dishwasher was a 9 yr old top of the range Bosch , it died yesterday morning " Yipeee " .
I now have access to six areas of thin gauge high quality stainless steel ... so I thought .

After getting the new replacement TOR Bosh in & set up I decided to take the old one apart to get some thin mild steel sheets , some reasonably precision fabricated angles etc. ( the door hinge bits ) some quality thin stainless steel sheets where I can get several flat squares of about 170 x 170 mm with a bit of careful cutting.
What I didn't count on was that all the external surfaces of the stainless " cupboard " have been given an adhesive fixed 7 mm thick coat of some black hard tar type substance which is part of the heat insulation and sound damping designs .

Have any of you guys done similar , if so how did you remove the black gunge off the stainless steel ?

 

[Digger6135]

If its bitumen based then petrol should soften it, so it can be scraped off, do it in the open air though, and no smoking!

Digger6135

 

[graffian]

Warm it up and scrape most of it off, then wash the remains off the bit's you going to use.

I used to take stainless from the local hospital scrap pile, there were almost always machines there, the best were big waste disposals that grinds up the contents of bed-pans, so I am told; they have nice large sides could well be 4x3-18swg stainless.

 

[DAPPH]

Thanks for your suggestions lads .

Well , I tried to warm it up from the inside with my blow lamp and use a spring steel scraper to lift it off .. it did work after a fashion but would have taken ages and cost me a bomb in additional gas cylinders for the blow lamp & white spirit to take off the remaining smears .
Due to having to go out in the near future I decided to pack up & make space in the walkway of the garage, so used a thin stainless steel cutting blade in my 4 inch grinder and took it apart into five panels in about 10 min .( I threw the door away as it was not flat enough ) .

Whilst dong the cutting up I had a wild exciting thought ( Steady on there Davey Boy ... your 64 )
What if I put it in the freezer at minus 22 oC, would it go brittle like toffee and knock off like home made toffee in a buttered tray ?

So I put a piece about 18 x 10 inches in the freezer, left it till I'd cut everything up . I then put a pair of leather gloves on to prevent cold burns & any cuts to my hands ( I'm on Warfarin ) , then took it out the freezer . Now I gave it a whack on the end of a cut down scaffold board , most of the 7 mm thick coating shattered & fell off . I then gave the remaining bit a tap with a 12 oz claw hammer whilst it was 15 mm away from the wooden face and it started to come off , when it hit the wood all of it came off. Total time to remove the coating on this piece was about 10 seconds . It left behind a lovely orange brown diamond pattern of where the adhesive was on the material .
So for the next two minutes I knocked off some more coatings off cut up pieces to give me six pieces of 170 x 170 or so mm.

I gave one piece a test removal/clean with a tiny dose of Nitro - Mors paint stripper on some old felt , left on for 10 sec and it all but wiped the marks off on the first wipe over. A second wipe with a tiny bit more fresh stripper on a bit of clean cotton cloth removed the remainder at the next wipe .
Now I have some clean shiny quality stainless steel 0.35 mm thick to play with .


Tonight I read in the instructions for the new Bosch dishwasher that the stainless steel in their dishwashers is guaranteed to be rust free for 10 yrs under normal circumstances ..... That sounds like I've got myself some 18/18 stainless steel .