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Paint stripper v hot air gun

garyi said:
Paint stripper used to be good, nower days you can drink it
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I still have some Nitromoors from back in the day when it worked.
HSE got involved and now you can drink it.

Caustic Soda is still available ( Belfast LOL) mixed strong enough is good but it will burn you like a strong acid.

All options require much hard work an lots of 'sandpaper'.
 
Suffolk Tony said:
priming the blowlamp up with meths (Ah! The Smell!), pumping it up, then getting a roaring flame going. Old paint doesn't stand a chance.
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Indeed, the lead in old paint vaporises and is apparently bad for your health..

How I remember that after all these years I have no idea.
 
Sorry chaps... I had a brain freeze and forgot it was a staircase! Confused by the drift to doors discussion.

Yes - Lead paint is still in British homes, usually buried under other layers - and probably best left there. Heat gun applied to lead paint? Probably not a good idea - masking up for a one off job you might get away with but would still not be the best advice.
 
I vaguely remember my first house in '75 which I completely refurbished. Discovered Vymura paints; wonderful stuff, and am still using left-overs from that time. I also remember the warnings about lead additives in paint, but believe it had ceased being used a fair time before then. Unlikely to be present on anything built since the (late?) sixties, I'd've thought.
 
Mmm now I wish I hadn't taken off all the hardboard door linings .... I was planning on continuing with hot air gun to get paint off round edges , but apparently vaporized the lead into the air ...

quite by chance I had a letter from a friend who works in the far East who is being treated for heavy metal poisoning !!
 
Not an excuse for being daft.. but a sense of proportion might help here...

I worked for four years in a Lead Refinery. We melted, smelted, and refined scrap lead in 50 ton batches, using assorted methods usually involving stirring delights such as caustic soda, sulphur, ammonium nitrate etc., into the molten lead. We turned the purified lead into pig lead, pipe, sheet, blocks etc. We smelted the resulting drosses in a rotary furnace, to recover lead.. and the 'contaminants' we had refined out of the lead. Almost all of them more toxic than lead and including, antimony, tin, arsenic, tellurium, silver and even gold.
All of the above was achieved wearing (when we could be 'arsed') simple dust masks.

We were tested periodically for blood lead levels and I always seemed to come out just below the legal limit. Getting sense out of the Docs who did the testing.. regarding things like margin for error.. or why they were only testing for lead. when the other metals were far more toxic.. was greeted with looks of disbelief.

But.. I have no evidence I sustained any lasting damage from exposure probably many thousands of times higher than many will ever experience.

However... children are far more susceptible to lead toxicity. Look after them.
 
thanks mr mull , wise advice , i have modified my plans to use a hot air gun though ... will concentrate on wet and dry paper etc and filler i think !!!

strangely many of us will have drunk a lot of lead through our lead pipes , especially if we live in old houses
 
Its amazing how little science knowledge there seems to be with some pfm members. Perhaps their school science teaching wasn't that good.

Lead is quite an inert metal thats why before plastic was invented we used lead in pipes. That and its malleability. When I left school at 15 I went straight into a paint development lab. I used to make small batches of specialised stuff like silicone aluminium paint for ovens and furnaces, pearl based lacquers for high-end nail varnishes, and of course paint stripper. I don't remember exactly the formula but it involved trike, dichloromethane and and paraffin wax all had to be gently and carefully mixed until a thick smooth gel formed.

Lead Chromate pigments and such like were used in primers and undercoats to protect metal that was to be painted and later exposed to the elements. These primed metal objects were then baked in large ovens until hardened. I don't recall any loss of lead.

Lead oxides were also used (although it was dying out all those years ago) mixed with linseed oil to make air drying red and white putty primer. It never really hardens but was excellent at filling the grains of wood so that a smooth high gloss finish could be achieved with air drying synthetic paints. In the late '80s I had to remove some of this putty primer from my 1930s house and once through the synthetic top coatsssss the putty primer was still soft rather like thick nougat. A little warming with a paraffin blow torch and it could be scraped off.

As for lead water pipes hard water would react to form insoluble lead carbonate that coated the inside of the pipes that prevented any further reaction. You'll note that houses built even today have lead flashing because its so inert and will last forever unlike plastic.

How many people who used the old 60/40 lead/tin solder have suffered from lead poisoning? You need to heat lead to around 450 degrees Centigrade for it to evaporate into the air.

The biggy was Lead tetraethyl that was added to petrol as anti-knock agent and that was later shown to affect young children so was eventually banned. Incidentally this substance was one of the first to useful compounds predicted using the periodic table of the elements.

Cheers,

DV
 
I have been using Peelaway products by Dumond Chemicals.
Four types based on what you want to strip.
Brush it on, cover with their brand paper or even parchment paper. Wait and peel most of it off. Wash with water and scrubbing brush.
If many layers might need a second go.
I have done outside stonework, old pine doors, baseboard and even painted cases for amplifiers.
Works great and has a slight almond smell....

Cheers
Julian
 
Darth Vader said:
Its amazing how little science knowledge there seems to be with some pfm members. Perhaps their school science teaching wasn't that good.
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Must you always be so patronizing ?

The problem with lead paint is the lead salts, particularly lead carbonate and lead sulfate, both of which were used extensively in the UK in residential paints from 1900-1950 (and in the US). Unfortunately the UK has chosen to turn a blind eye to this problem, unlike the USA where there is extensive study of lead paint, its removal (difficult) and subsequent migration of the lead into the wood. It is primarily a problem for children and pets, but once a house is contaminated, particularly if the carpeting is contaminated, it's difficult to clean to the point where it would be safe for young children.

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/prperty-call-time-on-heavy-metal-poisoning-1144886.html

I love old, restored, natural woodwork, and have had several interior doors professionally stripped. I then covered them with several coats of polyurethane varnish so that the lead impregnated into the wood due to the chemical stripping would not be accessible. I don't think it's safe to oil finish chemically stripped wood unless you know for a fact (i.e. have tested) that there was no lead in the paint/primer on the wood.

It is true that if you grew up in the era of leaded petrol then that was your primary source of lead exposure. Also, water is treated in much of the US to raise its PH to reduce the solubility of lead in older pipes and fittings (and some new fittings from China). However lead paint is still something to be treated with great caution.
 
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