Removing paint with heat, strip dining chairs, what happens when sanding, wood knowledge, plastic outdoor furniture, woodworkers catalog

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Removing paint with heat, stripping chairs, what happens when sanding, wood knowledge, plastic outdoor furniture, woodworkers catalog

We recently bought a 72 year-old farmhouse which, unfortunately, has every interior and exterior door, along with all molding around the doorways painted a million coats of paint. What is the best product to use to strip the paint. Because the previous owners used latex-based paint on top of oil-based paint, the paint is chipping. I wouldn't be able to repaint over it. So far, I 've used a heat gun for the doors which I've done outside. Is that ok to use indoors?

Thanks
Rose

Some paint will give off toxic fumes when high heat is applied and enough heat to remove paint and cause it to soften and curl could be enough to cause the toxic fumes.

If you do use the heat inside be sure to have exceptional ventilation with a couple of fans sucking fumes out of the house in nearby open windows and fresh air from a fan blowing across you. If you can smell any hot paint smell, stop, the ventilation isn't adequate enough.

When I remove paint inside where it's hard to ventilate properly I've started using an environmentally safe stripper like Citristrip. It smells like you're squeezing orange juice rather than stripping paint or a finish. It's a bit more expensive than heat, but in the long run, when you consider health matters and doctor bills it could be considerably less expensive.

Strip dining chair

When you strip dining chairs, if you're using a liquid stripper, put the dining chair legs, one at a time in an old cake pan, then keep dipping your brush in stripper and applying to the leg and pushing the residue down the leg. It makes the job go quicker and saves stripper by reusing it. You can strain it through cheesecloth when it gets too many chunks in it. It makes it a lot easier to strip a dining chair.

Sanding wood and sanding grits

When you take several different sanding grits of sandpaper, for instance 80 grit through 400 grit and run your finger over them you can feel that the 80 grit is very coarse and would hurt if you ran it over your skin using pressure, whereas the 400 grit feels smooth and causes more heat from friction, than pain.

Jagged cutting edge

If you looked at the sandpaper under a microscope you would see that it has umpteen jillion little particles on it and each particle is a jagged cutting edge for sanding wood.

80 sanding grit for material removal. 400 sanding grit for smooth

The 80 sanding grit has large particles and is designed to take a lot of material off in a hurry. Not recommended for general sanding wood furniture work. The 400 sanding grit has extremely tiny particles, so doesn't go deep into the wood, thereby making the wood smoother. If you jumped from 80 grit to 400 grit it would take you a month of sundays to get the marks all sanded out from the 80 grit and get a smooth finish, so you need to move up the sanding grit ladder slowly with successively finer grits, so it takes less effort and time to make a smooth finish.

Stain color will be different with different smoothness

The same stain color will look different with different degrees of smoothness of surfaces.

The cutting particles on sandpaper break open the pores of the wood and the more coarse sandpaper will leave the broken pores fuzzy . The fuzzier the wood is, the more stain it will absorb, so as you go to finer grits, the more the sandpaper will remove the top of the fuzz leaving shorter and less fuzz, so less fuzz means less stain being absorbed. By the time you get to 400 sanding grit the fuzz is pretty well shaved off, so there isn't much to absorb stain and the stain is just going into the unbroken pores and cells of the wood. Sanding wood isn't just a pasttime, it's an art.

Wood Knowledge

If you're interested in lots of information about lots and lots of wood species take a look at Wood Identification and Use, which is very comprehensive and informative.

Quick Tip about plastic outdoor furniture

Plastic outdoor furniture will last longer if you apply a coat of automotive wax with UV protection. Be sure to read the label, not all automotive waxes have UV protection.

Woodworkers Catalog

Have you received a free copy of the Woodworkers Catalog?

There are two available, one from Rockler Woodworking and one from Woodcraft.

If you plan to look at both all the way through in one sitting you should figure on a new pot of coffee or pitcher of iced tea, because there's an awful lot to look at and think wow you sure should have that. They're a dreamers paradise. They have several thousand items, including items you may not even know existed.

Click the link and you can have one of each very shortly.

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