All y'alls may know by now that I recently scored one-a-deez on my latest outing to our local Vintage Radio Museum.
It lights up and digits move, but there's a problem with one of the buttons that randomly sticks on, which makes none of the other buttons work. If you thump the panel it pops loose and the other buttons work for a few seconds until it sticks up again. I've disassembled it from the Star Trek shuttlecraft shell to try and figure that out, but this afternoon I was painting something else, so I decided to do the shell at the same time. This shell is a truly nauseating shade of brown in real life; these photos simply don't do it justice. You'd swear it had 20 years of nicotine all over it.
First, the rivets holding the handle need to come off; these escutcheon-stickers are the first step. I tried a little heat on one of the less conspicuous ones on the bottom shell, but it did nothing for the adhesive and deformed the sticker. The rest I am removing with a putty knife at room temperature. To get the putty knife started, I gently lift the edge of the sticker with a thin paring knife...
...and then it's just a matter of working slowly and carefully across the surface. I changed to a clean putty knife with a blunt edge; this keeps the putty knife from gouging bits of plastic out of the plastic underneath. These will make the sticker all lumpy when you reapply it.
Now that all the stickers are off, I can move on to drilling out the rivets in the handle...
The trick with drilling out rivets in plastic is to use high speed and light pressure; this keeps the drill from gouging into the rivet and just making it turn. Just dab the drill gently at the surface of the rivet for a second or two at a time and lift it away to keep friction from getting it hot and melting the plastic.
Once you get down to the washer, a Philips or Pozidriv screwdriver in the center of the rivet is all you need; a whack on the butt of the screwdriver with the heel of your hand will pop it through. After that, the usual washdown with clean towels and Windex followed by washing everything with a fresh towel wet with IPA and it's ready for paint.
... and now it's sitting outside, baking in the sun.
mnem