Paint Stripping

Aldini98

Hi,

Am trying to remove paint from the bannisters in my house. Its white paint which has green paint under it :rolleyes: The house is old which means they are probably lead based paints.

I've tried using Nitromore, which only removes the top coat of the white paint (not all of the white paint)

Can anyone recommend anything else I could use.

Thanks,

Al.

GreeBo

Aldini98 wrote:

Hi,

Am trying to remove paint from the bannisters in my house. Its white paint which has green paint under it :rolleyes: The house is old which means they are probably lead based paints.

I've tried using Nitromore, which only removes the top coat of the white paint (not all of the white paint)

Can anyone recommend anything else I could use.

Thanks,

Al.

yepm a shed load more nitromors and steel wool.
We just finished taking the varnish of our stairs. Its a bitch of a job especially where there is more than one layer. You just have to keep treating each layer like its a new patch. Dump the nitro on and dont let it dry out, you arent able to clean as much as you think you can in one go. Might be better off buying the own brand paint stripper as you will go through loads of it and we didnt notice any difference in quality.
TRied the other products (the 24 hour one for example) and it did nothing.
Nitro, steel wool and elbow grease Im afraid.
Though a scraper will make light work of any straight/flat bits.

Wertz

Get a shave hook too.
The trick with strippers is not to brush them out; ie not to overspread. The acid works by being in gel form and as the paint neutralises the acid there should be more on top to keep softening the film. Don't leave it on for anymore than 30 minutes or else it'll start to dry and make the blistered paint a fair bit harder to removew. Work in small areas and go as far as you can in that area....try to avoid the urge to go running off to another part of the job and start a fresh bit when the previous bit is only half done.

We did 5 storeys of a georgian period staircase before christmas; at least 12 layers of paint dating back over a century. Took 6 of us over a week to get back to bare wood, gallons of stripper, yards of sandpaper, a lot of burns and blisters and a general pain in the neck.
Someof the layers were tougher than others....we think it was some sort of old tech eggshell....the trick to removing that bit was to just keep scraping...the stripper would soften it but not blister it. A wirebrush was a great help at this stage.


All that aside, your other option is to use a heat gun, which is messy, creates terrible fumes and is a fire hazard in the wrong hands. We opted to go the chemical route for the sheer fact that we couldn't afford to damage the place we were working in....heat guns and hundred yr old wood are not a good combo.