Tutorial - How to stealth / remove branding / logos from alloy stem bars seatpost

I had a bit of time earlier on and I needed to stealth some badly branded parts for my new build.

The following technique works well on black aluminium parts where the branding has be laid / printed / stamped over the anodising. Mainly alloy stems, bars and seatposts.
It your parts are carbon or have a layer of lacquer over sticker branding, this will not work.

You need:

• Real acetone, concentration 95% or above. Ideally 100% acetone and not crap nail varnish remover. Basically the purest, the easiest it will be to remove the branding. You can get it from eBay, the chemist or any DIY stores;
  
• Some cotton or cotton cloth to apply the acetone; and
  
• A non-painted surface to work on, as the acetone might damage your surfaces.
  
  
  

Today, I removed the branding from a badly branded Boardman Pro stem. Sometimes I wonder why brands apply so much branding on their parts.

Step one, stem / 50 ml of 100% acetone / cotton / glass table and gloves of you have sensitive skin:

Step two, soak your cotton in acetone:

Step three, leave the cotton soaked in acetone in contact with the logos to remove for about 2 minutes. This will help reducing the amount of elbow grease you will need at the next step...

Step four, elbow grease time, start rubbing until it comes off. Keep that cotton 'wet to the touch' with acetone. It should take about 3 minutes per side.

Step five, rub some more as for some reason, once all the logos have been removed, there is sometimes a 'shadow' left with the outline of the branding. You can see what I mean on this picture:

Once it is done, it should look like this. Pretty easy job that only cost the price of the acetone (my 50ml bottle was £1.50 but you can get 1l for about £5)

Wow Looks
Much Stealth
Many Weight saved

I have also done my ITM Alutech bars with that little 50ml bottle of acetone so not a high price to pay for going plain...

Cheers

Vince

If you don't want to use acetone for some reason, and the logo is relatively small, I've also had great success with sugar. Just grab a pinch with a towel or rag, and start rubbing. The sugar granules are just hard enough to abraded the printed logos but will not scratch the metal underneath. Also works on matte plastic. You wouldn't want to use it on larger areas because it's a little more work than acetone.

Good work..

New forum bump

nice

For what it's worth - Pro LT parts work well for this. Cheap, work well and the logo comes off easily.

Will be trying this out tonight. Need to find some acetone.

Anyone any joy with semi-polished silver?

Did more logo removal for my new project.
Mixed results on this occasion.

The logos on the bars came off in seconds.
The logo on the caliper was over lacquer so the acetone removed both silver logo and some of the lacquer so not great.
The logos on seatpost and clamp are laser etched so no way of removing them...

any reason it wouldn't on polished silver?

Logos might be etched on silver bars.
Or the bars might be lacquered then branded.

If not, it will work!

FYI - leaving the stems submerged in a few mm of normal acetone for 30 mins and it just rubs off with a single wipe - zero elbow greased required. I used a small take-away container, which accommodated the stem pretty well and meant I only needed about 1/4 of a bottle to fill it a about 5mm deep

I stripped some painted/printed logos from headset caps this week. No acetone, just scraped* off with my pocket knife.

*Scraped is probably the worst description possible. Gentle rubbing/dragging the blade over the logo is maybe more appropriate. Surface underneath was anodised (I think) so this method perhaps needs more care to avoid scratching the anodise finish.

So, anyone know if this works on Thomson bits?

Thomson logos are laser engraved, so no

;(

pretty sure thomson laser etch their logos

edit: oops beat me to it!

Love this thread, have a bump

Pure acetone!

1 Attachment

my luck that my mate owns a pharmacy, so acetone is basically free for me.

My bad luck is that I've bought a stem in rush which had laser etched logos. SO, only way to go now is to remove the whole anodising and re-painting it in black

:(

Useful thread for my new project! Has anyone had bad experiences from the acetone treatment? i.e. base paint coming off?

If the surface is painted or varnished then you will have issues.
If it is anodised, not problems whatsoever.

That happened to me as a result of scrubbing the logo. If you soak it in acetone like I mentioned above the logos pretty much fall off so no scrubbing required

Vince. You are a credit to the forum and to stealth. Thank you.

Nice work, I'm gonna get on this at the weekend.