Refinishing

I have a bit of refinishing on the inside of my new/used 14 foot stained and varnished Tatman . I have been thru this before on other drift boats and simply sanded. However as a commercial fisherman who started out on old wood halibut schooners( built 1913&1927) I was thinking about how we used to remove paint on the hull on these boats, while sanding was used one of the main methods when taking the paint layers all the way down was with heat. A normal heat gun would work well for something like a drift boat though we used a large propane torch on the schooners. It wasn't too hard to pull the paint without any damage to the wood( old growth fir). I think I will try this when I get around to starting the job. Maybe find a scrap piece of plywood first I suppose. Anyway thought I would mention this both as an idea and also in case anyone here has used this method. It really made the process much easier. Bubble the paint up then scrape off with a stiff putty knife. A wire brush also came is handy. If this does work on varnished plywood it will make refinishing much easier. There will still be some sanding but I think all in all it will actually do less damage to the outer layer than sanding. The question of how plywood handles the heat is probably the only question.

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Permalink Reply by craig curtis on April 12, 2015 at 7:36pm

I stripped the outside of my old rapid Robert using the heat gun on the plywood. worked great on the side paint and the strange bottom coating material they had used. if it doesn't come off with the heat then I soak it with stripper. found a paint stripping sandpaper for my sander that doesn't load up and works pretty fast.

Permalink Reply by Gregg Maddock on April 13, 2015 at 8:26am
If the heat gun is able to change the the compound of paint and varnish so it peels away easy, what does it do to the glue on the marine plywood?
Permalink Reply by AJ DeRosa on April 13, 2015 at 4:36pm
Gregg,

Kevin, Dutch and I have done a lot of restoration work on old painted boats. The heat gun is one of several tools that can be used to remove old layers of paint. We burned some wood veneers as we were learning but never had a glue failure due to the heat. It takes a bit of practice to heat just enough to remove paint and not burn wood but even I figured it out after a while. Paint stripper, sand paper and steel wool all have their place in the process but nothing peels multiple layers like heat.

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