Best old paint removal tool on salvaged timber?

Is it worth doing though? For that sort of thing I use a gas torch and a shave hook.

I've done a lot of that in the past too. I don't like the fumes, or wearing a respirator much and I've got a yen for a planer. I suppose my question is really, will a planer do it?

We recently had a water leak, and the water caused the paint to peel right off the door frame it leaked upon (from the back side). Obviously you would risk raising the grain, but perhaps worth a try?

(I'm now wondering what the best way to strip the rest of the frame, given I don't want to re-saturate the wall. Possibly spraying and gradually peeling?)

Theo

You should certainly wear a respirator, and it won't do mouldings at all easily (some wag may comment about adjusting the cutter with an angle grinder...).

I suppose it'd do it, you might have to clamp up your workpieces though, and I bet they'd come out a little undersized. Me, I am not keen on electric planers (but I have a planer/thicknesser).

Any power tool with paint seems to be an issue through the melting of the paint and it sticking like the proverbial.

Whether this applies to a planer cutting through paint, someone here may have tried it?

What's wrong with paint stripping companies, or they too expensive?

I've heard of people making their own caustic paint-stripper using caustic soda and wallpaper paste to thicken up the mixture with mixed results

It all sounds like hard work to me.

There's something about chemical strippers that leave the surface not at all like clean fresh wood. I kind of fancy getting down to natural looking softwood.

That's something else I'm keen on minimising these days.

That's definitely a method I hadn't thought of.

Me too, but is there any possibility of lead paint ?, if so maybe not a good idea unless you have a means of avoiding breathing what you are burning off.

Power planer might create the least dust.

Whether it's worth bothering with depends on the value of your time and the quality of the timber but ... I spoke to someone this week who has started using a sand blasting rig to prepare old furniture for refinishing, apparently it works well.

It's an established way of doing huge damage to the appearence of internal exposed timber beams.

In my misspent youth and adulthood I've had quite a lot to do with applying caustic soda, strippers and sandblasting to wood and in most cases the finish has had a dingyness about it.

Being a retired old fart, I thought it would be a pleasing distraction from world affairs to take something that was being torn out and thrown away and attempt to turn it into something that was useful and appealing to the eye. Though, I'm thinking only of battens to hold shelves up for now.

The idea of a planer ripping off the surface to a precise depth leaving a clean and fresh looking surface is the current fantasy I'm constructing to justify buying an expensive tool at this time of my life. Maybe if I present the idea well enough, my wife might be enamoured of the idea too. But that might be rather too much of a fantasy.

How very attractive.