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When you say Paint Thinner do you mean house paint thinner or auto and car laquer paint and primer thinner?
Lacquer thinner is different stuff and is always labeled as "lacquer thinner" (up here, anyway). A closely related product is called "gun wash" and is intended primarily for cleaning paint spraying equipment - you would likely only come across that in a body shop supply business. We use lacquer thinner in fairly large quantities at the shop but I've never tried it on stamps. I know it's good for removing permanent felt pen marker, though. We also use it to remove weather stripping adhesive, that canary yellow stuff. I would expect lacquer thinner to be more likely to damage the printed surface of stamps. It also smells much more strongly, and I would expect that it's also quite a bit more flammable.
Here's a photo of the type of paint thinner I get from Home Depot.
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There are several "orange" cleaners, but I suspect there are additional ingredients which may not be friendly to stamps.
The active ingredient here is d-limonene, and I've used it with some minor success. However, there were too many stamps for which it was fairly reluctant to soften the gum and too many stamps for which it seemed to do nothing, and when I started increasing the time spent soaking in the orange cleaner, I started to have problems with the stamp image being damaged (red colours would be removed). No such problems with paint thinner.
Paint thinner has one handy characteristic - when you soak stamps in water, the paper gets weak and soggy and easier to tear, and the same thing happens to a lesser degree with the orange cleaner I've used. That makes it tricky to scrape gum off of the stamp if that's necessary. Paint thinner, however, seems to stiffen the paper. It becomes much easier to peel the stamp off of the envelope without ripping, and it's fairly robust when I scrape the gum off. I don't damage many stamps at all when soaking them in paint thinner.
Ryan
Posted 07/08/2013 6:23 pm
