I was told xylene was the preferred solvent for Plastidip....not sure it makes much difference....
I was told xylene was the preferred solvent for Plastidip....not sure it makes much difference....
Goo Gone Xtreme also works as a thinner for Shoe-Goo and the "Goop" products.
Mato:
Your comments are well taken, but the risk of drinking water also needs to be considered. Excessive dilution and /or elimination of electrolytes from the body due to excessive consumption of water can also be fatal. The use of either toluene or xylene in the area around your tying area should pose absolutely no harm at all, other than from fire. Both are quite flammable!
Now for a quick Organic Chemistry 101 lesson. The simplest of the so-called aromatic compounds is Benzene, which you can no longer buy. The next on the list is Toluene, which is less "reactive" than Benzene. Next comes Xylene, which is less reactive than either Benzene or Toluene. All three are well known organic solvents and what one will dissolve, the other two can reasonably be expected to also dissolve. Toluene and Xylene are both readily available, but my personal preference is Toluene, as it is the more reactive of the two. In other words, it "works" faster. On the down side, it evaporates faster than Xylene. Both are excellent wax solvents and de-greasers, as well as paint solvents. Hence their use by painters. Finally, renaming them Toluol and Xylol is apparently a marketing gimick. The chemicals are unchanged.
I've been assuming Toluol and Xylol were brand names.
Chemically, Toluene is known as methyl benzene, and Xylene is known as di-methyl benzene. The "OL" suffix infers that they are alcohols, which they aren't. The change may have come about as a way to divorce them from benzene, which many people are scared to death of. All of these chemicals are relatively benign if handled using common sense. As long as you don't use any of them as a mixer, as a bath lotion, or saturate cotton pdas with them and place the pad in a brown paper bag and "sniff" the fumes, they are no more dangerous than the gasoline that we put in our cars, motorcycles, jet skis and lawnmowers.
Peace!
Where does naptha fall in the line? I still buy it in the hardware store as a cleaning agent to remove fingerprint oils from modelmaking parts prior to painting.
Hi Ray,
Naptha is somewhat of a generic term, and it is used to refer to a number of different things.
There are light aliphatic napthas that are like petrolium ethers, and have a boiling point well below that of toluene. These are made up primarily of saturated hydrocarbons (paraffins, or alkanes) in the pentane (5 carbon atoms) to heptane (7 carbon atoms) range. Solvents of this type would be a very marginal solvent for flexament, as the solvency properties for paraffins is at the bottom of the scale for hydrocarbons.
Another meaning for naptha is a particular distillation range of hydrocarbons off of a refinery crude unit. This is where the crude oil is first distilled. This material is a mixture of all types of hydrocarbons, and thus has paraffins, olefins, and aromatics. This material is of intermediate solvency properties. It will be hard to buy this type of naptha now, because it has relatively high sulfur content, and so refineries further process it to get rid of the sulfur before it is made into consumer products.
Another type of naptha is a heavy aromatic naptha, which has a boiling range a little above toluene. This material is probably composed of some toluene, ethyl benzene, the three xylenes, some higher boiling aromatics, and various other cats and dogs. It likely also contains some paraffins. (This is from 7 carbon atoms, to possibly 9 carbon atoms, or so.)
This aromatic naptha has the highest solvency properties of the napthas, because aromatics are the best hydrocarbon solvents. This stuff should work well for a flexament solvent, but will be slow to evaporate.
Toluene, and xylenes work well for flexament solvents as well, because of their excellent solvency properties. I personally use toluene. It will evaporate faster than the xylenes, because it has 7 carbon atoms (and hense a lower boiling point) than do the xylenes which have 8 carbon atoms.
There are other solvents around, some of which work very poorly for flexament. lacpuer thinner is likely a poor choice, and I think MEK will not work well either.
Based on your comment of using naptha for cleaning off finger print oils, it seems likely that what you have is the petroleum ether type, because that type will evaporate quickly. To find out for sure you can type in the name of the material on the net under "search" and the name of the manufacturer. When the MSDS comes up it will list what is in it, although you will have to do some looking to find it. I supect it will take quite a bit of your naptha to dissolve much of the dried out flexament. It is also possible that the can of naptha that you have lists the ingredents right on the can. If it lists things like pentanes, hexanes, and heptanes, then it is the petroleum ether type.
Regards,
Gandolf
Last edited by Gandolf; 01-05-2010 at 01:16 AM.
I had a bottle of dried up Flexament, and a can of acetone used to take road tar off of my vehicles. Decided I didn't have anything to lose, so poured some acetone into the bottle, and voila, nice liquid Flexament! It seems to be working so far.
I was afraid that the acetone might fade colors, but so far it hasn't.
If you give a man a fish, he will have dinner. If you teach a man to fish, he will be late for dinner.
That's interesting O.
I tried some acetone on goop once... normal consistency ...all I got was jello.....
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