The Retr0bright Project

[Merlin]

Hi all, nice to see CA back!

I thought your Wiki may benefit from a link to The Retrobright Project, which is our ongoing work in cleaning and restoring discoloured plastic.

http://retr0bright.wikispaces.com

There's lots of reading there into how the project came about, an explanation in simple English as to how it works, recipes to try and Gallery of machines to show what can be achieved.

Feedback would be appreciated. Thanks.

[Tiago]

Excellent!!!
i must try it.
You know i try many times to clear my keys with no sucess, for the computer cases, i paint them and the result was very nice:

http://wiki.classicamiga.com/A600_new_case_and_painting
http://wiki.classicamiga.com/A1200_painting

but the keys always were the big problem, painting them i would lose the symbols...
i try to put them in washing machine, try many products, but none worked.
I must try this solution!
Great work !

[Harrison]

Great work on the Wiki Merlin. I had a look at the Wiki when you first launched it and it was mainly just the introduction page. It has evolved quickly and become a great site for the process and all details about it.

I have started a page on the CA Wiki about Retr0brite, and now that the official Wiki is more complete I will use the information on there to add some more detail and images about the process, as well as a link to the main Wiki.

Also great to see the high hit count already on there. You should be very proud of the achievement.

One question. Are you sure it's not possible to patent the process in some way? A lot of work has gone into the developing it and it would be very annoying for a company to take these ideas and produce something commercial from all your hard work, or to start charging to perform this process on customers machines.

[Merlin]

@ H

Unfortunately not The costs of patenting it were prohibitive and there are countries that don't respect patents anyway, I think you could guess the ones I mean....

We got a mention on slashdot and the rest is history; we even got onto the Guardian online , but for some reason they confused you with me... I think that's becuase they did a Whois on the AmiBay site... I've fixed that on the Wiki now.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology...mar/04/gadgets

If you Google Retr0bright now, you get more than 5 MILLION hits and the site went from 800 reads on Monday night to over 75,000 this week (the site counter broke under the strain!!)

I am totally stoked that the Amiga crowd finally made it back to a newspaper with something good for a change.

Here's some "soundbites" from sites and blogs that I posted on EAB after Googling Retr0bright...........

From The Null Device....

With the unabashedly 133t name of "Retr0brite" (or perhaps "Retr0bright".....)

From Reddit....

I wonder if it works on Grandmas?
The yellow staining on your Grandmother has little to do with the existence of plastic, but more to do with the lack of it.
Good God! I love the Internet.
This is the exact line crossing moment for when concern for your old electronics turns into unvarnished geek obsession.

From Cracked.com....

Hah! Now I can pawn my old computers off as new!

From Gamesforum.ca.....

Think of it as "designer chemistry"

From Blog.makezine.com.....

Commodore restoration! I bow.

From Hackaday.com.....

I can’t tell you how eternally useful this will be, I’ve wanted to restore that snes for years, and no site has offered anything short of destroying the plastic..

This is like something off an Anarchy BBS from the 80’s. Or the scene in the motel in Terminator when they start making pipe bombs.

From Neogaf.com....

Haha.. Now they just need to make a TV-shop commercial for this.

From Racketboy.com.....

NON BELIEVERS, BEHOLD!!!
(This was a quote from Eastside that did the SNES in The Gallery)
wow...Win !!

From Macresource.com....

It's a bunch of old computer nerds who just happen to be chemical engineers. I'm going to have the brightest Laserwriter on the block!

From rllmukforum.com.....

Yeah its cool that there's people out there who give enough of a shit to put the time and effort into researching a solution to a fairly trivial problem huh. Its class that it can be reversed.

We iz teh l33tne55!!!

[Submeg]

Holy ****! That's awesome, major respect to you and your knowledge of Chemistry!

[Harrison]

That is really cool indeed. I bet you are really happy.

The guardian link you posted is broken though because you copy and pasted a truncated url with the middle bit missing.

I did just do a quick google and you are right. Many blogs and news sites seem to have mentioned it. Very nice.

[Merlin]

Link now fixed.

To be honest H, I am proud that the Amiga community have got into the news for something good for a change, whilst at the same time being humbled by the way it's taken off, we never imagined that it would explode the way it has.

I am getting enquiries from Star Wars, Transformers and Lego forums about restoring toys, fruit machine forums about restoring the fruit tape reels, Land Rover forums about car parts, it's gone mental.....

Above all though, we made sure that all the communities involved got credited for the roles they played in the discovery. That was most important to me, I have never stolen anyone's work and presented it as my own. CBM Wuppertal and a1k.org did the initial work, all we did was perfect it and create the magic gel that does the trick in hours instead of days.