You know, I've been thinking about using that stuff since I can get it easier and cheaper than regular liquid peroxide, with the bonus of being more efficient to use because of its viscosity, but I've always been concerned about the other compounds in the solution besides H202 - could they harm the plastic somehow?

I had found it here: http://stiggyblog.wordpress.com/2011/04/10/ea … computer-cases/
http://www.atari-forum.com/viewtopic.php?f=15 … t=21607#p192498

So its already been used on retro computers..

£1.53 is just a steal!.

Cheap international shipping as well 😀

Robin4 wrote:

Dont waste time on making an retrobright mixture!

just buy a regulair bottle of this stuff!, Much cheaper on costs.

http://www.chemistdirect.co.uk/bblonde-cream- … 0vol_1_205.html

And you can bleach your hair with it when you're done removing the stains from your computers! 🤣

Get some radical blonde surfer tips hahahaha 😜

I have orderd two of those bottles... So i really want to try this out.. Because i have some very yellowed cases here.. So i hope i get them all new again.

Please post the results when you try!

Here are the results on an AT case I'm planning a build on. Used 40vol cream peroxide mixed with Vanish Crystal White laundry powder and around 7 hours of full sunlight. Due to the intense heat the paste dried up very quickly requiring several reapplications, so if you intend to do more than one machine, get several bottles or a large one.

And of course the before-after shots (click to zoom):

Overall I'm pretty satisfied, this being my very first experience with Retrobright. The right corner still has some mild yellowing which I believe matches up with it being the corner with the least exposure to light. For my future tries I've built this contraption out of some wood and a few components from a discarded microwave oven, so I can ensure that the plastic piece gets a completely uniform exposure to UV light.

Sliding some aluminum foil under the piece to reflect some of the UV back would also be a good idea.

really nice! But does it stays the same? Or should it be yellowed again?

Cool! My machines still look pretty good fortunately. IBM quality. 😀

If you don't care about the original texture, you can wet-sand the sides of the face with 500-grit, followed by some thousand, and polish them. It's just to take the degraded plastic off the outside. I experimented with this on some AppleDesign M6082 speakers. They polished up, beautifully and had the original gray, not the slightly yellow industrial-looking color.

Wow that looks much better, nice job! One day I'm going to try carefully priming and spray painting some yellowed plastic and see how that goes, I reckon it could work well, particularly for small things like drive bay covers and floppy bezels which often yellow at a different rate to the case, and are therefore hard to match.

Robin4 wrote:

really nice! But does it stays the same? Or should it be yellowed again?

Any plastic that gets retrobrite'd will re-yellow, because the process that yellowed it in the first place will just happen again.

The only way to prevent it would be to coat it with something clear, or paint it like badmojo is suggesting.

More results:

The Good
My Famicom

A friend's Famicom

The Bad
Western Electric Telephone
Use the handset color as a reference point, I left it untouched.

I think this is what they call white blooming, where you get patches of excessive discoloration:

I blame the Oxy-based product I'm using, it's Vanish Crystal White and the ingredients list says it contains an 'optical whitener'. I believe this compound may have helped the PC case and the Famicoms since they're white but it hurt the telephone.

Super Famicom
Now this makes me a very sad panda since this is my only Super Famicom 😢, looks like a combination of white bloom and not enough treatment:

Again I'm blaming the whitener in the Oxy but I'm not really sure. I think I'll try another go with regular Vanish and hope for some improvement. 🙁

I wonder if those packets of hair-bleacher that come in dye boxes would work for this.

SquallStrife wrote:

Robin4 wrote:

really nice! But does it stays the same? Or should it be yellowed again?

Any plastic that gets retrobrite'd will re-yellow, because the process that yellowed it in the first place will just happen again.

The only way to prevent it would be to coat it with something clear, or paint it like badmojo is suggesting.

Or the stuff you wax your car with. For sake of ease and longevity, just get a synthetic car wax.

Just did a yellowed MS Wheel Mouse Optical 1.1 I picked up at a flea market. The mouse on the right is my everyday one which I used as a control. It was done in about 45 minutes (probably less), no TAED this time.

If you look at it very closely 'brush strokes' of uneven whitening can be seen, but overall I'm quite pleased with the results.