Ok, my restraunt is getting bombarded with Graffiti attacks. And its not just me, its everyone around me too. We were thinking of setting up a network of cleaning this crap off, and setting up security camera’s and monitoring the area etc…
Anyway, I was wondering about removing graffiti. I’ve googled a few products, but whats something that works? What do I need to buy in order to get rid of this stuff? How does this stuff work? I’d love to pick all the straight dopers brains and work out exactly my best plan of attack here, any help is muchily appreciated, technical jargon would be great to 
If you buildings are painted, you can just paint over the graffiti whenever it shows up. Trick is to paint over it immediately upon discovering it. Buy a 5 gallon bucket, put paint, a roller and screen in it, seal it up and you can paint over graffiti in 5 minutes flat.
If a guy spends time painting stuff on your building, they will want to see it again sometime, not have it painted over the very next morning. They will move on to greener pastures for their art.
Or, hire a couple of big muscular guys named Vinnie and Slabs to hang around your joint for a few nights, & pay them to have a sincere discussion with the little rascals who are doing this.
You can get yourself an atmospheric pressure cool plasma jet. :eek: Another link to this gizmo.
Or if you wanna do it the boring way…try these products.
After they “tag” your building leave the graffiti there and paint the word “sucks” after it. So if someone wrote “Big Daddy Z” it will now read “Big Daddy Z sucks”.
For repeat offenders you can write “sucks big time”.
I have had good luck with a product used for cleaning engines called Gunk. I used to get it at KMart in the automotive department. HTH
Simply erasing it would probably increase your chances of survival.
There are anti-graffitti paints available at just about any well equipped paint store as well as Home Depot and their ilk. They’re thick, noxious oil based paints that will completely cover just about anything (they’re also good for painting over soot from fire damage). Lesser paints will frequently allow the spray paint to bleed through. Anti-graffiti paints also have the advantage of sealing off wood or concrete so that the next time it gets tagged it’s a lot easier to wash off.
Supposedly there are also coatings that can make it so that the spray paint can just be hosed off, but I have no experience with that beyond seening a segment on the news one time.
If I’m going ot get one of those, id at least get my moneys worth and shoot the artists themselves 
At work, we use something called “write-off” by Kay chem company.
Perhaps you should seek help from the School of Redundancy School.
Or he could just join my school, the University of Maryland University College European Division.
:smack: :smack: :smack:
I at one time managed a contract that was responsible for graffiti removal on highway signs, overpasses, bridges, etc. Over the years, we tried lots of different products to remove graffiti. What we found was this: If the product was strong enough to remove the graffiti, it almost always damaged the surface underneath to some extent. If the product didn’t harm the surface underneath, then it didn’t remove the graffiti very well. Bottom line: it is easier and more effective to just paint over the graffiti than to try to remove it. Even if the graffiti was on a plain unpainted aluminum surface (like the back of a street sign), removing the graffiti left a “shadow” that you could still see even after the graffiti was completely removed. Apparently something in the spray paint that is commonly used by graffiti taggers.
In my experience the paiting over it the very next morning trick works very well. They’ll eventually leave you alone but continue to paint your neighbor’s walls.
Haj
There are, they’re very helpfully referred to as “anti-grafitti coatings.” Generally they’re installed on new construction, but can easily be installed on older buildings. Essentially, what they do is encase the masonry/walls in a solid layer of…plastic? and the grafitti essentially has nothing to stick to. Depending on the product, the grafitti can be removed with a hose or a special solvent.
There are a wide variety of these things available, some that need to be replaced and one that supposedly never does, no matter how often it gets tagged.
Going this route is a bit drastic. It’s quite expensive, extrememly difficult to apply and must have a nearly-perfectly clean building to affix properly. Things like rain, heat, humidity, wind, improperly cleaned masonry, gaps in mortar, etc. will interfere with the application and you’re out $20,000. Of course, the stuff often reacts strangely to bricks and starts to peel off, making your building look like it’s gotten hit by a salt truck.
We’re using is on 3 projects right now and it’s not worth the headaches.
Of course, taking any action at all could make it worse. I just remembered that several months ago some local merchants, who had HUGE plate glass storefronts, were getting tagged on the windows themselves…but the punks were using acid to etch their tages into the windows. No way to clean THAT off. :mad:
That’s bad. I always wondered why I very rarely see grafitti on glass, only on walls. I figured it was a code of honor sort of thing.
Couldn’t you hose it off of glass?
It’s trivially easy to get paint off of glass, you can use a single edge razor blade and just scrape it off maybe even a rag with paint thinner would do the trick. Glass is too hard, smooth and inert to be easy to paint or scratch. Now, the polycarbonate (I think) windows on the NYC subway are targets for ‘scratchitti’ since they’re softer than normal glass and the cars themselves have been made paint resistant.