Testing out the heat gun - paint stripping

The woodwork around our house has never been stripped, only ever repainted with layer upon layer of gloss.

It's finally at the point that another layer is pushing it.

I picked up a DeWalt heat gun, skeptical of the process, but was amazed to see how well it works on gloss. Even getting round all the profiling detail of the door jambs was super easy. The paint bubbles off right to the bare wood all around the hot patch and comes off as a kind of film, rather than a sticky mess. You just peel the film off with the scraper. Very easy! The film will literally peel like a rubbery orange, it shouldn't be molten or burning.

It's easy not to burn things around the gloss, since the gun needs to be right up to the paint and turned all the way up to bubble it off at a decent rate. Which is about 600C at the outlet for this 2kw DeWalt version.

Under the gloss, I discovered a layer of stain or varnish. That doesn't come off, it bubbles and burns.

I hit it up with a pair of my favourite solvents, dichloromethane (DCM, or 'paintstripper' to the commonger) and acetone. Suprisingly, acetone works really well, I could basically wipe the door clean.

In the scaled up version, I will use a bowl full of it, scourering pad and gloves, which need to be butyl rubber to resist the solvent. Acetone isn't particularly toxic, flammable or dangerous, but spending hours with your mits in it will dry your skin out big time.

A big 5l container of pure acetone will set you back all of ~15 pounds, where a 5l tin of stripper will be more like 25 or 30. Stripper is about 50 - 70% DCM (solvent) mixed with a polymer. The solvent is too thin to paint on, so the polymer is added to thicken it up and make it stick to vertical surfaces. Contrary to popular belief, stripper is not very dangerous at all. DCM is not particularly toxic and the fumes won't knock you out. It does dry the skin out better than anything else I've seen and it really hurts if it gets in your eyes. It'll dissolve most rubbers as well, making it a pain to find suitable gloves for.