Hello All.  Steve here from Team eXtremeSuper.  Well, I wish I could say that this project was a highly skilled, cutting edge technological makeover involving the latest in nano blah blah blah.  In fact, brains and brawn managed to intertwine several times with this little thing.  Enter the nitrous bottle.  A simple piece of cast aluminum with a nice blue PAINT finish.  Notice the "paint" in all capital letters.  Nothing could be further from the truth.  We will get to that in a moment. 

Here we see the original bottle with factory sticker installed.  It should peel right off, right?  WRONG!  Man this thing had some killer adhesive on it.  If you could market it for toupees, you could really make some money.  Anyway, I tried scraping it off with an ordinary  5 in 1 painting tool.  Slightly modified with a sharper edge than original.  No-Go.  OK, I work at a cutting-edge manufacturing facility with every machine and tool possible.  What should we try? Heat!   WARNING! Before doing ANYTHING to a nitrous bottle, you must make sure it is empty and that the valve is open.  This will allow any expanded air to escape the bottle.  This should work.  It only works if the heat is applied correctly.  Here are some facts about this awesome heat gun:

The Wagner HT775 is the most powerful gun in Wagner’s heat gun line. It produces 1680 Watts and 5700 BTUs. This means 1000° F!  Trust me, this thing is HOT!  The heat gun worked, but only after trial and error.  I couldn't heat the sticker, and successfully peel it without flambéing my fingers, so I tried pliers.  That does not work either. 

Instead, heat the scraper, and scrape the sticker with the heated edge.  Finally some progress. I then remove the valve handle.  Before loosening the nut  I noticed a little bit of slop in the handle.  As you can see it was broken.  Nothing a little dab of industrial epoxy can't fix.  No sweat.  Next I taped the valve with some serious shipping tape.  This would protect everything from the quick 80 grit abrasive sandblasting it was about to get.  Or so I thought.  After about 40 minutes of trying to get this stuff off the tank, I decided to use a Dotco 2 inch grinder with a coarse EZ-Buff head.  It's like a scotch brite pad that shows no mercy.  This thing will take off skin!  After about 20 minutes of that, I found out that this "blue paint" was not paint at all.  It was a highly wear-resistant plastic-kote that was super tough. 

I recruited my 5 inch Dotco with a 320 grit abrasive disk and proceeded to "Git-R-Done!"  NOTE!!!:  If you must use an abrasive disk, use come caution.  It will remove aluminum from the bottle!  I have been in the injection molding field for almost 15 years, and I started out doing metal finishing.  If you apply too much pressure, those scratches will show through your new paint job.  Use some TLC and you should be fine.  When all was said and done, I was coated from head to toe with so much of this blue crap, I looked like Papa Smurf.  When I completed the grinding, I went into the sand-blast booth one last time to even out the affects from the disk.  It is now completed, and ready for priming and painting.  A big thank you to Midwest Mold Services for letting me make a mess of the sand blaster.  I did clean it up, though.  I talked to owner, Brian Finkel who loves high-performance cars and he was happy to volunteer some of our machine shops time for making the distribution blocks for the Nitrous.  This will be done in the next few weeks, so keep watching for some "how-to" machining and pipe thread tapping.  I may want to thread-mill these since it is a highly flammable material flowing through these and we want the best seal possible.  We will see what we can do.  Later!

Steve J.