New Paint Stripper Has Ruined Finish on Wood

mrobsessed

Hi All,

I've spent a lot of time stripping 90 years of paint off a door frame and a picture rail and have been using a heat gun followed by paint stripper and steel wool, and have been getting a nice finish on the wood.

Recently I got some more paint stripper and noticed that the stripper is totally different, being white and coming in a plastic container rather than being brown and coming in a tin, and discovered that the old stuff is no longer being manufactured and has been replaced by a new and safer chemical.

I continued my stripping with the new stripper but noticed that the wood finish looks different and much worse than with the old stripper. The old stripper produced a slightly glossy wood finish with a nice golden colour, but the new finish is dull and grey/white with a bleached appearance.

How do I get a good finish with the new stripper? Will staining or varnishing the wood help? A local store still has some of the old-style stripper - will using this restore the surface?

Any help would be appreciated!

Thanks.

DVardysShadow

In your position, I would carry on and do the door with the new stuff, despite the apparently worse appearance, sand down and then treat the wood. The worst thing you could do is stop using the new stuff half way through the job, particularly as the outcome is so very different. This will almost certainly leave a difference in texture or finish, whatever you try to do to treat it. So you will see the door forever more with the difference in finish etched into it, rather than having to compare a uniformly finished door with what you think it might have looked like. If you could actually treat it to completely eliminate the difference in appearance, then in fact there will be no great loss in continuing with the new stripper.

Almost certainly, despite the poor appearance now, you will be able to treat it to produce an excellent result - but it will be much harder to disguise a difference between the surfaces as they are currently stripped.

mrobsessed

Thanks for that advice - worth thinkng about! As I intend to varnsh the wood the difference in the finish could well be visible and once the varnish goes on will be set in stone.

thanks again.