Pigeon Point Paint Peeler: Test Firing

Here at Pigeon Point we have a bunch of paint that ultimately needs to get removed. It’s like no paint you’ve ever seen before. This dirty gray paint is on the exterior of the house, on everything but the asbestos siding. It has texture in it, and I swear the texture is concrete. If our paint were sandpaper, it would be about 10-grit. This stuff is so nasty you wouldn’t put your scraper to it for fear of ruining the tool. Chemicals would falter on encountering the first pebble-sized texture granule. This stuff is tuff and disgusting.

A couple of weeks ago we removed the bead board ceiling of the front porch so that we could install the radiant floor heating for the room above. This bead board is layered thick with the “paint” I describe above. Before it gets reinstalled the paint must be removed. The plan is to clean up this original bead board well enough that we can varnish it. When we first took the boards down, Trissa spent a couple of hours with the heat gun cleaning up a few samples.

The heat gun worked pretty well. But it was SLOW. The gun heats an area just a few square inches at one time. By my calculation we have 21,600 square inches of bead board to strip.

A few months ago I happened upon a page at Ocean Manor House describing how to build a Silent Paint Remover, which I had read about over at HiP. The guy over at Ocean Manor built his own Silent Paint Remover (an “Infrared Paint Remover”) out of a quartz-rod heater and some spare parts. I decided this was just too cool to pass up, so $40 and a few trips to the hardware store later, Trissa and I built our version yesterday. Tonight we gave it a test firing.

The Pigeon Point Paint Peeler is constructed out of sheet metal and the guts of a $20 quartz-rod heater purchased from Amazon. It is not UL-listed. It is a fire and shock hazard. It does peel paint, 84 square inches at a time. We’ll do a full write up soon, with more pictures and instructions for those of you brave enough to follow suit.