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Old 03-26-2015, 09:36 PM   #13
Marin
Scraping Paint
 
City: -
Join Date: Oct 2007
Posts: 13,745
Quote:
Originally Posted by manyboats View Post
windmill29130,

But I really don't know how bad those strippers are. Does anybody?

Eric-- The modern consumer strippers I've tried (not for varnish but for paint on things like window frames) are next to worthless. Environmental and safety concerns have reduced chemical strippers to being so weak as to not be worth bothering with, in my opinion. And we've tried just about every one on the market. You have to use so much of it to make any kind of dent in the existing finish that all you end up with is a horrible mess that gets all over everything.

This was not true back in the 60s and 70s when strippers were available that actually stripped. But these products were so strong (I used to use them to refinish gunstocks, a pocket-change business I had for awhile in college) that they would severely burn you if you got even a tiny bit of it on your skin. In comparison, the strippers available to consumers today you could probably put on your breakfast cereal with no ill effects.

The super strong stuff may still be avaialble to commercial stripping companies, I don't know.

We use the heat gun/scraper method for removing everything now: varnish, Bristol, paint, you name it. No gooey, sticky mess getting all over everything, and the finish, whatever it is, comes off first time, every time.

The only caveat with using heat is that you have to know how much to use in each situation and develop the proper "constant motion" technique. And you have to protect the surrounding surfaces form the heat. My wife has fabricated a number of heat shields of different sizes and shapes that she positions to protect surrounding fiberglass, other finished wood, painted interior paneling, and so on.
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