Stripping of CARC Coating

[swall]

I have steel components that are coated with the CARC coating specified by the U.S. military and I need to strip this material in a manner that will preserve the surface integrity beneath the coating and not thermally damage the shot peened surface. The coating needs to be stripped in order to inspect the surface prior to fatigue testing. I have tried plastic bead blast, which does not touch this coating and aluminum oxide grit blast, which removed the coating but trashed the surface.The coating vendor does not have any recommendations.

 

[CoryPad]

Between plastic beads and aluminium oxide lie several media, including softer oxides and natural materials. I bet ground walnut shells would be an option for this application.

Another option is dry ice removal.

 

[unclesyd]

It is going to be extremely hard to remove the coating without changing the surface profile. I've tried to remove similar coatings epoxy/urethane, epoxy, urethane from steel surfaces using everything in the book including all the above mentioned blast media along with both wet and dry baking soda, wet ice, and mixtures of the above. We had some partial sucess with baking soda on some of epoxies and very few of the epoxy/urethane (weathered).

Our only sucess was using our Pyrolysis Ovens, normally used to remove our process polymer from piping and equipment. If your parts are amenable to this process it would be the way to go as at this process is used to clean painting equipment.