Stripping woodwork - after the heat gun

[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. if you fill holes you can stick little fragments of wood in there too, especially screw holes that will be reused.