Strip Paint Easily

Although these plane tracks look savage, they are no more difficult to remove than troughs from a heavily cambered jack or scrub plane.

I'm always on the lookout for good timber. Sometimes this means recovering wood that's been painted. I spied these boards at the dump. I could see the tannin of the oak burning through the white paint. Thankfully the person who decided to “up-cycle” hadn't used a proper blocking primer, otherwise the medullary rays would have stayed hidden.

I don't like using chemical paint strippers and sanding just creates dust and clogged abrasive. So a handplane it is! I felt certain that an aggressive Jack plane would cut through the paint very quickly. It did for a brief moment and then refused to cut. The paint seemed so abrasive, thick and tough that another approach was needed.

Note the plane is set to leave tracks.

Plane tracks are normally something we avoid, right? But I though perhaps introducing them would be a benefit here. I backed off the cap iron and set the plane to leave a deep track on one side, fading to nothing on the other. I was able to add downward pressure with a bias to the projecting corner and it really tore through the paint beautifully! Although the paint was still dulling the plane iron, it stayed sharp enough to do the job for longer than a cambered iron.

I found working across the grain gave best results. I don’t normally do this, I like to work with the grain where possible. Also, once one side of the iron had become dull, I could switch to to the other. Sort of getting two sharpening sessions for the price of one. I’m not saying others haven’t used this method before, there’s nothing new under the sun. But practical problem solving gifted me a method that I can use again and again. Perhaps it might have it’s uses for levelling of cupped wood too? Time will tell.