Stripping woodwork - after the heat gun

[Manalto]

I've been stripping what seems like acres of molding, trim, banisters and doors with the heat gun, which leaves a fair amount of speckled paint debris. If you use a heat gun to strip wood, what is your process for removing this and getting down to the clean wood?

[Gothichome]

James, you have several options, if your spots are close together you can hit them again with the heat gun. Another option is to pick at them. You can try spotting them with some stripper, or go at them with a good sanding which you’ll have to do any way, I find I use all these techniques, but there is no getting around it, it will be tedious. Once you have removed all you can, your last option will be to touch the remaining specks with paint to match.

[Manalto]

I know what my options are. The reason I asked the question is to find out what you have done that works best for you.

I was hoping Larissa would see this and describe how she stripped that beautiful staircase. I think she used citrus stripper, but I'm not sure. In my limited experience with citrus stripper, I have found it to be mostly ineffective.

I want to keep sanding to a minimum because the grain is raised, particularly on the doors and I'd like to preserve that look if possible.

[1918ColonialRevival]

I've never liked the citrus stripper. Seems like you have to use a lot of it to be effective, especially on old paint, and it's a bear to clean up.

There are a couple of approaches I've used. For small specks, I'll hit them with some #000 steel wool and naphtha, which will usually loosen them. For stubborn areas, I'll use a stripper. Of all the ones I've tried, I like Soy Gel the best. It does a good job with older paint (my wife recently used it to strip an Eastlake wardrobe that had been painted in the 1920s) and doesn't have the noxious smell associated with some of the other types.

[Gothichome]

James, I use them all. For my stripper I use the circa, for no other reason than I bought the large can. I have not used any other so have no preference. If you are dealing with paint stuck into the grain I have no suggestions to offer.

[Manalto]

Thanks Ron. I think the only option for that embedded paint is a matching color touch up, as you mentioned. I picked up some dental tools for the nooks and crannies but I've got a lot to do and a finite amount of time on this Earth.

[phil]

you can try adding some paint or stain to your stripper , so for example if you are removing the remainder of white paint the specks are diluted and turned brown.

I usually use sanding unless details prevent that. If I'm prevented from sanding yes it adds a lot of time. if sanding lightens the area that is easy to correct with pigments during refinishing.

if you sand wood and wet it it will raise the grain. old wood sometimes has more because of wood shrinkage. You can replicate the effect with sandblasting or pressure washing but that's a bit extreme. I'd just make it smooth and flat myself.

I'd treat old furniture different than old house parts. There it is expected that you will spend more time per surface area but if you are stripping miles , break out the belt sander and skip the nit picking little fragments of paint. It'll drive you nuts and all the chemicals aren't good for you to be spending hours with without a mask.

on casings or baseboards. I strip roughly then belt sand or use my table sander. If you have access to one a drum sander is perfect. for the edges of the casings I take a kiss cut off them on the tablesaw, then run my router over to recut the corners. on things like stairs or window ledges I use a belt sander or pad sander.

what I mean here by a "drum sander" is not one for floors. woodwork shops usually have one , this is a stand alone machine that you run boards through and it sands the top surface. the correct terminology is probably a "wide belt sander"
here are some examples.
https://www.scmgroup.com/en_US/scmwood/ ... nders.c869

you obviously won't own a wide belt sanded but if you wanted to you might be able to give a pile of wood to a woodwork shop to run through. It would have to be a significant amount as they may not like running used lumber through unless the paper is changed later. you can do most with a hand held belt sander but you do need to be careful not to dig holes so how you hold and use it is important. the machine I refer to does nothing more than sand the top side and transport the board through. most are wide enough for a door, but it would not touch the inset panels, that would be hand work. I expect you wont use a wide belt sander but I mention it because if you have enough to do. like many feet of baseboard. it would be a machine that could shorten the job considerably.

the minimal cut of the edges on my tablesaw squares them up , removes dents and things from the edges. If you dont want to use a router you can just use the hand held belt sander to make the roundover if you are careful. the router is fast though. I just mount mine under my tablwesaw so after the kiss cut I can run fresh edge against a router bit with a guide bearing, so the bearing runs on the fresh cut edge. my resulting dimension may be a teeny bit smaller but not noticeable. with that you wont be scraping and picking at the edges or the roundover areas.

I can also process baseboards and casings by running them through a thickness planer, cut off about 1/16 to 1/8th to get it flat and down to true wood then you can add some thin strips to the backside edges to make up the difference if you care that much about the thickness. If I do that i run them through upside down to true up the back then it is easy to just glue some 1/4 x 1/4 strips of similar wood to make up the thickness. It takes about 30 seconds for a pass through the planer, belt sander might take a bit longer but removes less material. a drum sander is just as fast but many don't own one. normally they have a couple of drums with different paper , coarse then fine and you just basically plop them down and run them through and they will remove a mm or so evenly and easily.

there are a few things about using a thickness planer to get down to bare wood. if the plank is cupped or warped it can require significant removal in order to flatten the board. also, its hard on blades cutting old wood that was previously finished. the blades would cut right through the paint but they will dull quickly, so I remove the paint first, at least most of it, to save my blades.

Saving the patina is a slippery slope. I'd save that for furniture restoration but of course what seems most reasonable to you will be your choice. If you are having fun keep doing it.
some are afraid to crack wood during removal and so do it in place. there may be situations but pulling baseboards and casings is dead easy and if they crack so glue them right away and dont worry. I very seldom crack anything anyway , it just takes some careful prying. pull them off, deal with them to a finished stage and nail them back.
pull the casing nails right through, that way they wont chip out near the nails. I fill all my holes and sometimes use them again on reattachment. filling any dial holes gouges etc happens after sanding before finishing the wood.

I like using a danish oil finish. If I want later I can apply shellac but I prefer to leave them oil and later I can return to do more coats or add some sort of varnish and hide the nails during that process, or you can just use wax crayons to cover the nails.

I use thin nails for most reattachment , long thin nails come in strips for the air nailers. You can use an air nailer. I prefer to break them off and drive them by hand. I use a little block of steel dowel with a hole the nail loosely fits into to start driving them so they dont bend then just use a hammer , then a nail set. this way they are tiny and I can choose exact locations, like if there is a natural mark I might use that as my nail hole. I mark the studs so the nails do something. you can use casing nails if you prefer but if you do then pre-drill with a tiny drill bit to prevent any cracking. If you dont pre-drill you may crack your newly finished part, because the wood is dry, so dont do that. If you do cause a crack then you might clamp it up in place or you might need to remove it if it is difficult to clamp up tightly. -so either use thin nails or pre-drill.

doors are a bit harder as you have recessed areas to deal with. so for that you may do most with a sharp scraper. You could belt sand the higher areas but not the panels themselves. I use a hand scraper a lot , just a blade, no handle and I keep several of different thicknesses some with a more aggressive hook and thin ones that are just filed square and sharp. the kind of wood scraper with a handle isnt' for finishing it will work with the heat gun though. with just the blade you have better control. Its well worth spending the time to sort out some good scrapers that work will for you. I would probably find myself levelling out those areas you call raised grain unless I thought of them as significant. If it's less work to do some handwork than remove the hardware than that might be an option. a hand scraper is hard to use properly at first. also the surface is hard at the start, once you are down into the base wood it goes a lot easier and you can really flatten things and get into tight corners easily. - so a simple flat blade hand scraper is one of my most often used and important tools. If it has a long handle on it that's a different tool it's not really a tool for finishing wood. The kind wiht the handle are for rough work, a cabinet scraper is for finishing work. Yes you can use them interchangably in some cases. the type with a handle does not have the abiulity to bend in your hands so you tend to loose control at the corners and that can leave scraper marks. with a cabinet scraper you can bend it just slightly so it is not digging in near the edges of it's swath. you can also file it to shapes. you can also keep a fine thin one and use that for finer finishing. If you use a thicker one and burnish a hook on it you can really hog off wood similar to using a plane especially if you are working a plank on the workbench so you can get your weight behind it. Id use that somewhat on areas where I saw flecking or perhaps where a baseboard had some cup in it but I didn't want to remove the cup. the bend of the blade will allow me to work in slight hollows.

sometimes baseboards or casings have warp. one trick if they are badly warped or cupped is to lay them on the lawn cup side down. the lawn will supply moisture and the sun will dry the other side so you can control warpage that way in some cases.

a baseboard that is 8 inches wide can change considerbly in its cup shape as it recieves or gives off water. so if you have a board that is badly cupped and you cna flatten it before you go sticking it through a thickness planer you will loose less wood, then after as it finds its cup shape again this is not a huge issue as it was before the start. If that board is 8 inches wide and 3/4 thich and it has 1/4" of cup in it, then the thickness planer wont break through over the entire surface until the plank is 1/4" thinner, or 1/2" thick. that would be obvious but if you added a couple of stips to the backside when it was put back in place the only thing you could se is the glue joint or the difference in grain of the wood you used for the strip on the back. the bottom isn't even visible only the top edge so as long as that is a good match no one would know or care that your baseboard is only really 1/2" thick.


another way is to accept the warp but now you have to use things like hand held sanders or scrapers to access the hollow part of the plank.

what the wood is doing is finding its own natural shape due to its internal stresses. if its cupped it wants to cup, so if you plane the cup out then it is more dimensionally stable. if you use moisture to your advantage you can make it a bit flatter and nail it in place and that may help with fitting if you do have warping issues. you might warp things if you pull them off and change their humidity by storing them in a different location for time. sometimes if I store boards that have some curve I use humidity and weight and time to my advantage in order to force them back into shape. If its twisted I might choose to lay it on the cement or pile other boards on it to weight it so that it slowly bends back into a more flat shape. I could for example, remove twist with two pipe clamps that are simply using the weight of the pipe, and time, to untwist the board. you have a certain amount of control and outside that you are fighting the laws of nature. steam or humidity may come into play. If a board has severe cup the only way you'll really make it flat is to make it thinner and you dont always want to lose that much material so it can be a trade off too. If you simply pull them off to refinish and then replace you probably wont see much change in dimension. making a short board flat usually involves less material loss than making a long plank flat. often if I cut parts that require exact dimensions, I will do a rough cut, let them naturally acclimatize to their newfound shape and then trim more precisely. this might be important for example if they are door parts. Its hard to fit a warped door or window. A baseboard is less critical. this becomes more important if you are taking other old house parts from other locationns and using them. or if you are working with "new " wood or that which was cut down to size recently. parts of your house that have already found their attitude want ot stay like that but you can go buy wood and use it to later find that the humidity and internal normalization of the wood structure caused some changes you were not expecting.



a very basic rule that i think of sometimes is this. If you are spending huge amounts of time doing something you are approaching it wrong. There is almost always a faster way. when I get working on very monotonous details I also find myself trying to think of a quicker way, a better way. often by the end of the job I become better at it and much faster, and the situations change of course. experimentation is often key.

one other bit. If you are spending tremendous mounts of time restoring what is basically a stick, for example the stops on our windows or the roundover in front of your baseboard.. You might be better off just replacing that , cut a new one instead of putting hours into restoring a stick. its just a stick, use some reclaimed old growth lumber, throw it away, and replace it with the same kind of wood, instead of wasting a chunk of your lifetime restoring a stick that you can cut in minutes on your tablesaw. baseboards and casing represent enough wood and odd dimensions so I do restore those but not 1/4 rounds. that I can buy cheaply or cut my own. sill blocks I sometimes replace if I dont feel like spending that time to save a little block of wood. I find that since I sand the floors I need longer ones. use your own judgement, but no stick is worth a whole day of labor, a plank or a door maybe. Its not best judgement to replace everything as you are restoring not replacing but but there comes a point where you can cut something much faster than strip it.

[phil]

another thing I'd mention is this.
when you find yourself picking out bits of paint form a board, and you realize that the bits you are picking out are in recessed areas, think of mixing some wood filler that exactly matches your wood for color. you can just push on those spots and cause dents if you wish, as long as those flecks aren't as high as the surfae the wood filler will hide them , or you can use artist paints and things. avoid spreading filler or touch up paint to areas where it is not needed. punch a little hole in your masking tape, dab the filler on , pull the tape. If thee are cracks then lay your tape either side of the crack , fill pull the tape right away, later sand the bump flat. the less surface area touched by filler the better.

you can coat whole planks and floors and things with wood filler and then sand them but this usually ends up with a situation where the filler is covering areas where it is not needed and if not fully removed can become noticeable during finishing, so I prefer to keep the putty area small. also a dab of filler may appear to fill a nail home but either you will cover the area near to the hole or you wont really fill the hole right through the plank. If you punch your tape you can press a big wad of filler down on that little hole and press the filler right through the plank then pull your tape , then the holes is actually filled not just hidden on its surface. same for cracks.

I suggest mixing some blendall powders with water based wood putty , experiment until you can lay your finish over both the dried filler and the wood and not see a difference in tone. It will take time to arrive at the certain color you need but once you have it then you can keep it for future use. If you keep the container in a ziploc with a damp sponge it will not dry, even if that type of filler dries you can reconstitute it with water.

you can use the solvent based fillers, they dry faster harder are better at not getting messed up by moisture. your container will dry quickly of you keep it open , you can dole yourself out small batches. I'd save that for furniture but if it was for the outside of a door I would not use water based putty ,Its only for indoor use.

so instead of picking flecks out sometimes you can press them in and fill them. It could save some fussing about.

[MJ1987]

I know what my options are. The reason I asked the question is to find out what you have done that works best for you.

I was hoping Larissa would see this and describe how she stripped that beautiful staircase. I think she used citrus stripper, but I'm not sure. In my limited experience with citrus stripper, I have found it to be mostly ineffective.

I want to keep sanding to a minimum because the grain is raised, particularly on the doors and I'd like to preserve that look if possible.

James, after I heat-gunned, I then slathered with the good stuff (full-strength chemical stripper). I then wiped off as much as possible with clean rags. I then used brass brushes and a 2-gallon bucket of lacquer thinner and scrubbed the wood. Anything that was embedded in the grain would get gently scrubbed with a steel brush. Of course, the brushes were small--tooth brush and slightly larger--not the one I used to clean paint brushes. This method removed 99% of paint. The last 1% was addressed by using a slightly more pigmented stain, rather than one that's essentially clear.

Hope this helps! Hang in there...

[phil]

plastic (nylon) scrubbers work too. the stripper will dissolve some plastics but others are unaffected. I get my stripper in 5 gallon buckets from Mohawk finishing supplies. it comes either as a gel or liquid. If you can deal with the fumes , lacquer thinners works in a similar way but evaporates fast and of course it's highly flammable and gives off a lot of fumes. one school of thought is that if you can make chemicals do your work and use less abrasive techniques you do less damage to the patina, if your objective is to save the patina, scraping may show.
some paints cooperate better. Milk paint is hard to strip usually from what I've seen but maybe some is water soluble. If it has shellac heat gun stripping is easy since the shellac melts as soon as you warm it up. on some stuff that is shellacked under the paint the problem of those flecks getting stuck is much less. If it's red paint and buried right into rough grain that's harder. I found red is bad for wanting to dissolve and re-embed itself somewhere else.
if you have cracks you can cut tapered sticks , very thin on one side and wet pieces with glue and stuff that into cracks. wood is the best filler. often cracks open due to shrinkage. you can run some stock about an inch wide 1/8 on one edge tapered to nothing, set that in a corner and use it whenever you have a crack you want to fill rather than fighting with paint and stuff in the crack.