Posted by David Sherman on Tuesday, February 28, 2006 at 9:04AM :
In Reply to: Strippers(Paint that is) posted by Judy Cushing on Tuesday, February 28, 2006 at 8:00AM :
I have a friend who used to be in charge of airplane painting for a large airplane company located in Seattle. He often travelled to different places in the world to deal with customers' paint problems. He told me there's some relatively poor third-world country, which one I can't remember, where most of their airlines send their planes to be stripped before they repaint them. The procedure is basically to just park them out in the open, swab buckets of methylene chloride all over them, and scrub the paint off. The men who do the work have no protective gear at all and are often barefoot, and the paint and solvent just run off the tarmac to wherever.
Personally, I don't mind using methylene chloride, though of course one needs good ventilation. The toxicity mostly consists of temporary unconsciousness. In the past, it was used as a surgical anesthetic, like ether. I would be wary of long-term occupational exposure because it may be carcinogenic, but so may lots of things. I have tried the so-called "safe" paint strippers, which are mostly a mixture of alcohol and lye, and they don't work at all.
On woodwork, I always use a heat gun and scraper to get most of the paint off and then use the paint remover to clean up what's left. Maybe you could use mild heat to bubble the paint off your door before you strip it. Acetone or MEK, which are fairly safe, will remove some kinds of paint, but with all those layers I'm sure there's one layer it won't touch.
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