How to clear the Xbox Jewel

This is another easy tutorial, all it takes is a pack of sand paper with varible grit intensity and an hour of your time. I will go through a debunk a few methods that were circulating on Xbox-Scene's tutorials that claim to strip the green paint right off with minor effort.

Easy Off; Oven Cleaner

I read about using oven cleaner to get rid of the paint after spraying the jewel and letting it sit for a couple hours. Put some gloves on (this stuff could do some damage to the skin), lay the jewel down in the sink, shake the can up, and spray it on the backside of the jewel. Come back, wash it off and you're all set, right?

Wrong. I did this a total of three times. Each time I noticed minor advances. The true work that was done was removing the silver paint in the Xbox logo's letters. So if you want to clear out your silver letters, use this method for sure. It will indeed remove the paint but lit will leave an outline of green in the corners of the letters. (You'll need to scrape this out with a small file later)

Your results will look like this;

Paint Thinner

Paint thinner, not mineral spirits. Remember what mineral spirits does to your jewel? Incase you forgot, it clouds it. I've read that using a moist rag isn't enough to strip the paint, so you soak it. The paint should just dissipate while it's in the jar. So I ganked an old pickle jar and filled it enough to submerge the jewel, went to bed, and woke up hoping to see a glassy jewel in the bottom of the jar.

Wrong again! It didn't clear it out, but it did put a dent in the paint. The paint may not be gone nor even translucent, it does look faded. AS you can see it didn't cloud the front of the jewel either. Whew, my mom was wondering where all the toothpaste went. Maybe we could leave it in there another day? I'm sure you'd agree with me that we'd like to play the safe route and say no, we don't want to wake up to a jar with nothing in it only to learn that that shit eats plastic. Lets move on, shall we? ....please say yes.

Here are the results;

Sandpaper

Sandpaper? Whoa, that's intense! Fucking right it is, you know this is your last shot (unless you come up with another chemical like nail polish or dog spit) so don't fuck this one up. Luckily I have two jewels. Well, one and three fourths. (Thanks Brandon)

So I'll first start off by giving you the run down of what you need.

Supplies needed;
An Xbox Jewel, moron.
Sandpaper with assorted grit. ( grit? grits? mmmmm, makin' meh hungree)
A cloth, or old T-shirt.
Toothpaste.
Damp wash-cloth.
Common sense. (not sold at Walmart)

Here's what the jewel looks like so far, before we start sanding.

Alright, now that you're done raiding your house, garage, and fathers tool shed, we can begin.

Lets get started with a strong grit, such as 80.

Hold the jewel in one hand with a small amount of concave with your palm. From there you can move the sandpaper and the jewel seperately to get a little bit more accuracy. Take it slow! It's like losing your virginity, take it slow and you won't be screaming "Damnit! This has never happened to me before, I swear". Yeah, bad but humorous analogy. So go slow with that and periodically use your cloth or t-shirt to whipe off the jewel to make sure you're evenly sanding and to get the dust off there to check your progress.

Things will get a little messy with all this paint dust flying around, and you'll look the the hulks pissed off cousin in no time. Especially if you use that t-shirt.

Now that you know you wouldn't like me when I'm angry, lets keep moving.

I'd like to tell you the grit of the next sandpaper we'll use, but I'm assuming someone down at 3M thought it'd be a good joke to not label the rest of these!

So use your judgement, we wanted to use the 80 grit to really stript the paint down to nothing with minimal exposure to the jewel's plastic. If you went balls out and sanded half the jewel and half your finger-nails, that's alright too. We'll fix that later.

We're going to start to slowly move down the food chain of the sandpaper to the less corse. Move your way down and down repeating the same methods as I mentioned above, keep checking the jewel, hold it up to the light every now and again after brushing it off. You should definitely see progress after the 80 grit. This is what mine looks like after a couple minutes of slow sanding.

Once you move along and notice you're down to the last sheet of sandpaper and you only have very minimal hair scratches on the jewel, start worrying about the corners inside the Xbox text. (that is if you chose to remove the silver lettering) Take a small file, preferably one that's triangle shaped and slowly start rubbing it one way, parallel to the edges of the letter. Otherwise you might fuck up or get some weird X-ing scratches if you did it too hard. Be gentle, you're not in a hurry.....are you? Going out tonight? Probably not, you're sitting infront of the computer reading an Xbox tutorial. Do you even have a girlfriend? Alright, enough joking around.

An example of the green paint inside the letters, a good reason to start filing.

Remember our last tutorial? How to remove the jewel? I showed you a little trick to shine that puppy you call a jewel. Any toothpaste will do. In my case I used whatever was available, not tryin to endorse a toothpaste here. Get out your wash-cloth and toothpaste and start shining the back of the jewel. Hopefully after awhile you will be able to see how much it has improved after washing it off and checking it now and again. Notice your jewel smells like a Crest factory and you have toothpaste stuck in the letters. If you have a room mate or family member you don't like, use their tooth brush and give those letters a good brush. (It's not like this will harm anyone. You're brushing off TOOTHPASTE, not shoving it up your ass.....yet. That's the next tutorial.) What should your jewel look like after a good spit shine?

As you can see, there's alot of hair line scratches on that guy, so I'll go back to a low grit sandpaper and sand slowly at a perpendicular angle to even them out. After you've completed that to a satisfactory level, get the toothpaste out again and give it a final shine and you're done!

Here's my progress, compare yours.

Now doesn't that look sexy? Ohhh yes.

In my opinion, I don't think it's good enough totally clear. So what I ended up doing was getting a very small art paint brush and some black model paint and filled in the letters. I put about five coats on it to fill the resevoir with the letters and to cut down on the light passing through, so don't stop at one coat. Once you're done with that you'll get these results.

Congrats, you've just cleared that jewel like a room full of girls.