I will start out by saying this wasn't an incredibly expensive or valuable reel that I tried this method on. If it messed it up I wasn't going to lose any sleep over it. The result looks a lot like what you would get using an extremely gental blast media, so I was pretty impressed.
To strip the paint on this reel pretty much effortlessly, I used the self cleaning function on my oven.
Now there are some potential problems with this and I am not encouraging others to try it. I am simply looking to open up the topic for discussion.
Potential problems:
1) not all ovens are the same, some could possibly get hotter than mine...maybe even hot enough to melt aluminum
2) toxic fumes. Not sure about that one. I would assume this paint was some sort of oil based enmel and the amount on the reel is probably pretty small. Again I just don't know how much of a concern that it should be. To be safe, it would probably be best to use an old oven in a well ventilated shop and possibly wearing a respirator. I don't know if all of that is necessary or not. I did mine in the house just turning on the vent hood.
3) potential to warp the metal being heated. In an effort to prevent this, I heated up the oven with the parts in it starting from the lowest setting and gradually increasing to its highest baking setting over the course of 15-20 minutes. I then turned off the bake function and set the oven to self cleaning. I only left my parts in the oven for 40 minutes before cancelling the self cleaning function. After that time, I allowed the parts to cool on their own in the closed oven for a few hours, again to try and prevent thermal shock/warping.
4) also burns off lubricants. This is a good thing when repainting It is a bad thing for oilite type bushings. I removed the bushing from the reel to prevent damaging it.
5) dissimilar metals being heated together. There were 2 steel parts I left in. One was a friction fit pressed in steel pin in the crank handle and the other was a steel pin that the anti-reverse dog pivots on. I actually lightly oiled these pins in hopes that the oil would burn and make a semi protective coating kind of like seasoning a cast iron skillet. That appears to have happened. I don't know how much of a potential problem it is to heat dissimilar metals together.
When I did this, I wasn't really sure how hot my oven gets so I used foil under the parts and watched carefully for any signs of melting of the foil. It didn't harm the foil in the 40 minutes I heated the parts using the self cleaning function in my oven.
The reason I did this process is because I tried removing the paint with a nasty chemical striper with very little luck. I also tried a heat gun and it wasn't working well and I worried about warping when heating small areas. I decided a gradual heat up and cool down evenly in the oven might be a better option. I had used the self cleaning feature to clean up old nasty cast iron skillets in the past with great success so I thought it may work well for paint removal as well. It did a great job for me in this case.
One note to add, this process didn't seem to harm any anodizing. I didn't think it would and I don't believe it did. I checked continuity of the anodized parts and there is none just as it should be.
Does anyone else have any thoughts, questions or concerns about doing this?
I would love to hear any feedback, positive or negative. This may be a good option or a bad option of others but I think it is worth examination.
