Nylon Abrasive Brushes
Variously known as nylon brushes, nylon abrasive brushes or abrasive filament brushes, I’ve recently been using these to remove
grot and paint from bits of motorcycle with good results.
They come in two flavours: orange - coarse or blue -fine. Orange is quite rough on aluminium surfaces, so you may want to stick with blue on this (unless your ally is heavily pitted). On steel surfaces, orange is your best bet for paint removal, but it’s not abrasive enough for heavy rust removal. You’ll still have to use a wire brush for this.
The brushes are available in various designs, so there’s one to suit most applications. Toolstation stock them and are cheap, but only sell the coarse versions. Silverline tools do a range of coarse and fine brushes. You can also find them on Ebay, if you don’t have a local stockist. Frost Automotive also stock them, but these are much more expensive. However, I have one of their blue end brushes (bought some years ago) and it is much softer than the current Silverline blue and provides a very nice surface finish.
The orange flap brush removed the paint from this starter motor cover in short order (pictured), and left a surface that was suitable for painting without further prep.
A combination of orange followed by blue was used to clean off the grot on this sump pan.
The blue nylon version was used here to produce a 'brushed' finish on this heat shield. This helped to conceal some bad 'gravel rash' that was far too deep to polish out.