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| Original Chest of drawers, June 2006 |
Final Chest of Drawers, |
Final Chest of Drawers, |
Equipment Used: 3M Safest Stripper, Denatured Alcohol,
Stripping Pads, Steel Wool, Brass-Bristle Brushes, Dental Picks, Wood and Putty
Chisels, Putty Scrapers, Methylene Chloride, Mineral Spirits, Minwax Gel Stain,
Minwax Stainable Wood Filler
Page 1
When I bought my house, in August of 1998, I found three matched pieces of furniture in different regions of the house. One was a large bureau, stored in the basement. The second was a bedside table (and I can't recall where it was). The third was a large chest of drawers, about as high as my nipple, shoved in a back corner of the small second floor room we've been using for storage.
All
three had been, in their past, painted with a truly horrible pale green paint
(which, come to think of it, isn't much different from the background of this
very web page). The photo at right is a closer look at the existing paint job:
thick brush strokes, ugly texture. That's what all three of these looked like.
The three pieces were old and worn-looking, and the bureau was missing several of its handles and its drawers slid in at weird angles. For a time, I used it as the stand for my table saw, and thought nothing of plunging the tip of a drill bit into the top on one project. One day, I decided to throw it out... but for some reason, I decided to try using Peel Away 6 paint stripper on it as an experiment. Turns out that, under the green paint, the bureau had a nice mahogany-veneer surface that looked terrific under the reddish sludge that had been the finish under the paint. (Further down this page, under "July 8th," you'll see a photo of what this looked like.)
So I decided to try to refinish the bureau. It was in the basement already, and it seemed the most in need of repair. I didn't have a camera then, which is why I didn't document that refinishing job. But here is the final product, so you'll have an idea of how it turned out:
In case you're wondering, the stain was Minwax's Sedona Red. When I did this to the bedside table, I used Minwax's Mahogany, as a Gel Stain, which was easier to work with. That's pretty much what I'm going to do to that chest of drawers over the next few weeks.
(I have to apologize for some of these pictures. I really haven't used a camera since a housemate stole my old Canon AE-1 about twenty years ago, and I'm still getting the hang of the adjustments I can make on this Sony unit I just picked up. And I'm working with existing light fixtures. The above picture glistens too much from the flash, but the grain pattern really pops: the flashless photo was accurate, but dull.)
If you'll have a look at my other wood stripping page, you'll see that my usual strategy is to use Peel Away 6 at first, and switch to methylene chloride for the detail work. You see, most of the wood in my house has a layer or two of latex paints on top, and under that is something that could be oil or even lead. The latex comes off in small sheets; the understuff comes off like thick toothpaste. There's all sorts of wrong with this; the smell passes into the house, it's messy, dangerous, and difficult, lots of cruddy waste, etc.
But the paint on this furniture was a lot thinner, and there was a layer of finish under it. So I tried a heat gun: sometimes, that liquefies the finish, allowing the paint to come right off. This was the result:
No good, obviously.
For my next experiment, I took one of the top drawers down to the basement and applied a stripper that hadn't given me very good results before: 3M's Safest Stripper. I try this one every so often because, if it really was safe and non-fumey and cleans up clean and took the damn paint off, I'd switch to it in a heartbeat. But so far, it hasn't stripped much paint for me, usually because of that multiple-layer issue described above.
But the chest of drawers seemed to have only one layer of this paint, so maybe it was worth a try. I dabbled 3M Safest Stripper along the top of the front of a drawer, a spot which I could always sand down if any problems arose. The stuff is difficult to spread evenly and thickly, as the instructions specify, and I don't think it'll stick to vertical walls as well as 3M thinks it does. (It also looks like... nahh, let's not say it. Let's keep this page family-friendly.) I covered the strip with plastic wrap to keep it moist, and went away for a few hours. I came back and found, surprise surprise, Good Results. Click on the pics below for details.
(You'll notice that the colors don't match in the two photos above. My workshop uses fluorescents, which have a skewed color temperature, so I tried two different settings on the camera. Compensation for fluorescents, above left, was nice and warm. But the other, above right, showed the unpainted wood grain inside the drawer in a nice way, so I figured, let's give you readers a comparison.)
Look at the above-left picture. Notice that there's a slight bubbling on the front, from a stray dollop of stripper. That's what you should get when you use this stuff. Notice that the top of the drawer front is seemingly irregularly colored: that's because there's some finish there, and a spot or two where the 3M wasn't thick enough to do much stripping. As I said, I've been disappointed by 3M's Safest Stripper. But in this particular case (an actual case, really), it worked really well. So I'll probably buy a new supply and use it here.
Took the first prep-step, and ordered two gallons of 3M Safest Stripper.
Started applying the stripper to the drawer fronts (above) and the side of the carcase (below, clickable).
Part
of the general strategy is to let gravity help the stripper. So, I would be
doing the carcase one side at a time, turning it over so that the side being
stripped was flat, and the stripper could saturate the paint.
So why start with the side? Why didn't I start with the top of the carcase? Two reasons. The first was that I still thought of this as an experiment with Safest Stripper, and I'd rather have a half-assed strip job on a obscurable side than the highly-visible top. The second was that, since I'd be turning and flipping the carcase on all sides, I wanted to leave the paint on the top to protect it during this process.
The wrinkles you see in these photos are, for the most part, from the stripper, within an hour or two of application. Safest Stripper may not be the most powerful, but it acts surprisingly quickly, and you can see that the paint has started to come up from the wood.
Fact is, the stuff has the texture and consistency of thin custard, and it doesn't apply with a brush as evenly as one might like. Notice the unevenness under the plastic wrap. I'm tempted to dilute it with water (it's water-based) and see if I can pump-spray it for economy and evenness. (It may mean giving it more time to strip-- not a big problem, IMHO.) If anyone out there's tried it, let me know if it's worth the effort.
As for its safety and comfort, I have to admit, 3M's right. There are no fumes, and when I got some on my hand it didn't burn at all. (Methylene Chloride, on the other hand, feels like a cigarette burn.) However, there is a slight smell of stripper (it's vaguely mintlike), and my throat feels a little raw at the very back. I will try to put a fan in the window and blow these extremely vague fumes out of the house. But this is a LOT less intensive than the fumes I've had with other strippers, including the relatively contained Peel-Away 6.
(Note added much later: That throat-rawness only occurred the one time. Otherwise, Safest Stripper was undetectable.)
This morning, roughly 12 hours after I coated the drawers with stripper, I started to scrape off the paint. Below are two photos of the two top drawers, taken from slightly different angles. (No, they don't work as a stereoptic image, so uncross your eyes right now.)
The lighter area in the upper left is an area I tried stripping and sanding earlier during my initial test. I hope I can make that area match the rest of the drawer, but it's likely that I'll do that at the sanding-and-finishing stage.
As you see, after taking the paint off, there's a layer of shellac that liquefies. That's a huge help, since the shellac kept the paint from embedding in the pores of the wood. But once you pull the paint and stripper off, it starts to turn solid again.
Right now, I have three strategies for getting that cleaned off. The easiest, cleanest method is to use a paint thinner of some sort-- thinner, denatured alcohol, whichever works-- and use it to dissolve the shellac residue. That doesn't always work completely effectively, and usually requires a lot of scrubbing. Method 2 is basically letting it dry, and sanding it away. The third method would be to use a very thin application of methylene chloride to re-liquefy the shellac, scrape it off with steel wool, and then wash that clean with alcohol.
I
decided to cart the drawers out to my front porch and take advantage of the
open air. I decided to remove the stripper, and then wash the drawer fronts
with stripping pads soaked in denatured alcohol while the stripper-shellac sludge
was still liquid.
Here's a close-up of one of the drawers as I was stripping it. It's a very important photo. Go ahead, click on it: you'll see what you're in for when you're inspired by this web page to try it yourself. I'm rolling back the plastic wrap, trying to do so in a way that keeps the sticky-paint crap under wraps, so to speak. Notice that the paint separates from the wood mainly because of the shellac. Also notice that you still need to use a scraper or thin chisel to remove a lot of this stuff. Notice whatever you want (maybe even the face of Lincoln in the warps and crusts of chemicals); this close-up photo should give you an extremely vivid and accurate sense of this job.
But still, it's worth it. The photo below shows what happens once you've washed and wiped that drawer front down with denatured alcohol. There's still a few bits of unstripped paint on the upper right, and a crescent of paint in a nick made by the drawer hardware. Click on the photo and examine the surface carefully. You may see a faint light pattern that looks vaguely like alligator skin: that's more or less due to the way the stripper separated the paint from the wood (compare to the photo from July 7, above.) I do not know if this pattern can be camouflaged with stain, which seems the most likely to me, or if I'll need to perform some bleaching or sanding. But this is the second most important photo on this page: the first indication that the final product might look really, really good.
Right now, the drawers have a second coating of stripper and plastic wrap on the patches were the paint remained, and I'll probably finish those tomorrow.
During
the week since I cleaned the drawer fronts, I also took the paint off of the
side, and went over those patches on the drawers. There were patches that didn't
strip properly, so I applied a second patch of stripper. And that's where things
developed a problem.
The photo at right shows a degree of blotchiness that turned up, in glaring, flash-lit relief. Between some of the stripper dying on the surface, the unevenness of stripping only splotches, and the like, the wood looks like this. And yeah, that gorgeous strip-job on the drawers you saw above ain't as perfect no more.
However, when I pour denatured alcohol over it to try to clean it, the blotchiness disappears. (As I've said, this makes the wood look as though it was finished.) So, while I may have to clean the wood some more, I'm going to try applying a layer of methylene chloride first to see if that evens it out.
Copyright 2000-6 Brian Siano
(unless otherwise noted)