I have a 61 Ford unit bodied car that I had plastic stripped to remove the
three layers of paint. Cost was $300 in metro Detroit in fall of '94. My
alternative would have been aircraft stripper but the mess, time and waste
disposal made plastic stripping the preferred method. Plastic stripping
does not remove rust but it will wear at leaded seams a bit. I had to skim
coat all leaded areas with body filler & fill primer. Plastic stripping
also does not have an effect on either glass or bright trim. There will be
remnants of the plastic stripper - dust & granules in creavacies that need
to be washed out or blasted with air. Personally, I was not about to have
the existing primer, seam sealer, etc removed from every nook and cranny
that I might not be able to reseal. As an interesting aside, car bodies
received a phosphoric pretreatment starting in the late 50s or early 60s
(at least US iron) so my car body did not get any surface rust even though
I did not get around to epoxy priming it until several months later - the
owner of the plastic strip co. had stripped half of a car to bare metal,
right down the centerline (with out any other metal treatment) and was
using it as his daily driver without any surface rust. There were a few
small rust spots on the lower doors of my car that I sandblasted prior to
having the car plastic stripped and these areas discolored with surface
rust with in a few weeks from moisture in the air. Also FWIW, I found out
that Ford had done a lot of prepaint prep in the assembly plant (smoothing
out the body with fill primer, etc.) prior to paint and I had a lot of
unanticipated work (car had been in the family since '65 so I knew what the
original painted surface looked like) to get the body prepped so the paint
would look any where near showcar. I would assume Triumph did even more
body prep prior to paint although I have never stripped any of the Triumphs
I've owned down to bare metal
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