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Sometimes I buy tools to do jobs that I hate doing, then I find out that the job wasn't so bad after all when I had the right tool. The feature tool for his issue is something called the "Silent Paint Remover" (SPR). Around our house the paint stripper is my wife, and depending on the project she is working on, she is anything but silent, so this tool intrigued me. This tool incorporated a new technology, Infrared. Now infrared on it'sown is not a revolution but basically it means that when you apply heat to many painted surfaces, it softens the paint enough to scrape it off.
The idea behind the SPR is that in order to remove old paint from surfaces it needs to be modified in some way that makes it malleable and therefore easy to scrape off. Anyone who has scraped paint of old furniture will understand that the words "easy" and "remove paint" are seldom used in the same sentence. Removing paint from old wooden objects can be real tough. .
The SPR uses a newer technology, Infrared heat, to warm the paint up, making it much easier to remove than traditional methods.
I know a bit about Infrared as one of the heaters in my workshop uses this same technology. It produces a very even heat that is almost like the heat given off by the element on an electric stove. If heat can be called "soft" that is what Infrared heat is like. It is much harder to burn anything with Infrared heat which is why it is such and ideal element for removing paint.
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My wife inherited an old cedar chest from her favorite aunt. It is a beautiful piece of furniture that is estimated to be over 60 years old, and all hand crafted. The only problem with the cedar chest is that it no longer has that wonderful aromatic smell. I looked high and low for products that would some how rejuvenate the wood and bring it back to it’ former aroma. I even tried a bit of cedar extra oil on a small part, but not only did it not work, the small amount of good it did only lasted a few days.
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We are in an age when changing or enhancing the color of wood simply means using one of the fine stains or dyes are readily available. It wasn't all that long ago that the to change or enhance the color of wood was something called Fuming. It's the same thing that mother nature uses, oxidization.
Mother nature does it naturally with oxygen, but we don't have decades to wait, so we can speed up the process with ammonia. The benefits of fuming wood is that you always get a consistent color, no need to worry about dye lots or color names on the can, and the coloring can penetrate the wood up to an eighth of an inch deep for a rich permanent coloration (not longer fuming is required for deeper wood penetration). The disadvantage is that different hues and tones are difficult to control because of differing wood types and length of fuming time and even colors withing the same woods, but we can see these with stains and dyes too.
The Lost Art of Fuming Wood for Color
To fume wood you only need four things, ammonia (more on this later), a plastic or glass (NOT metal) container (with a lid) for the ammonia to aerate from, and some sort of a sealed plastic tent or container in which to fume the wood.
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I am one of those people who hate to admit that they don't know how to do something as simple as purchase a paintbrush. I can't tell you how many paint brushes I have purchased over the past 30 years. That is because when I buy paintbrushes, I either never seem to get around to cleaning them properly, in which case after about 2 weeks the bristles have about the same hardness as my ballpeen hammer or, they look so terrible when I am finished with them I just throw them out, which us not usually to hard to do as I didn't pay that much for them in the first place. Then I began to realize that the crappy brushes I was buying were not helping me in getting a nice finish on my woodworking projects.