Solvent for Teflon?

A. Mark,

To be precise, blunt, concise, very brief ... in short, the answer is NO.

I guess you have two options, neither of which you'd love. l) Burn it off ... but that means pretty high heat and some nasty fumes (wear mask) or 2)grind it off. Mind you, I guess you could use a molten alkali ... there being very, very few chemicals that will attack Teflon and those would probably destroy your part anyhow!

Cheers!

A. There is another alternative. I have successfully removed Teflon coatings with glass bead blasting. I used #9 glass bead and usually a pressure of less than 30 psi will remove the Teflon. Some PTFE resins are tougher than other and other factors come into play such as whether or not the Teflon was baked, cure temperature, PTFE type, etc. In most circumstances this can be done without harming the substrate.

A. Phenol can do the job, look also for www.quadesl.org/home/origcoat.html [Ed. note: that link/URL is no longer functional]. When it is the solution I like to hear it from you.

With friendly greetings,

A. A molten salt bath system will remove most organic based coatings including Teflon from metal parts.

A. I read with interest the responses offering suggestions for removing Teflon from parts & thought that I could possibly offer some assistance. I have been in the High Performance Engineering Plastics industry for 20+ years with a primary focus on Engineering & design of application solutions. I am not sure if you can handle these chemicals in your process but here are some suggestions:
"Teflon" fluorocarbons resins are essentially chemically inert. Up to the respective upper use temperatures (500 °F. for PTFE; 400 °F for FEP) only very few chemicals are known to chemically react with these resins, i.e., molten alkali metals, turbulent liquid or gaseous fluorine and a few fluoro-chemicals, such as chlorine tri-fluoride ClF3 or oxygen difluoride, OF2, which readily liberate free fluorine at elevated temperatures.

A. Dear Mark,
It is very difficult to dissolve Teflon by solvents but can be etched out from the required part keeping the other part unaffected. But at first I want to know, what type of plate you want to mean; whether it is a metal surface or a fiber glass surface. Let me know about this, so I can suggest the procedure.

A. Commercially Teflon is etched by "free" electrons liberated by sodium in liquid ammonia [on eBay or Amazon]. While this is more convenient than the elevated temperatures required by alkali metals alone, the process could probably be improved further by using primary or secondary aliphatic (not aromatic) amines that are liquid at room temperature or slightly higher allowing for the very exothermic reaction.

Hi cousin Muhammad. Based on the 7 answers already provided, I'd say there is little chance of finding a solvent for Teflon in paste form unless I am misunderstanding you. Please try your best to phrase your inquiry in terms of the answers already offered. Thanks!

Regards,

A. Hi Ahmed. Questions which are not understood properly cannot be answered properly and, sorry, I don't understand your abstract question. What does 'teflon paste' mean to you? Who are you, what is the intended function of this paste, and why not just buy it? To a plumber 'teflon paste' means pipe dope which contains some teflon particles in it. Is that what you mean, you want to formulate and sell pipe dope with teflon in it? Or are you trying to make long low density teflon objects by lubricated paste extrusion of teflon paste from which you will later remove the hydrocarbons? Or were you hoping to make teflon coatings by brushing on 'teflon paste'?

A useful guideline for posting is to use more words in your question than you want in the answer :-) Thanks and good luck.

Regards,

A. Hi again Ahmed. If you google "msds teflon paste" or "msds teflon pipe dope" you'll see quite a bit of info about various formulations. Good luck.

Regards,