Ain't no silver bullets!

I was imagining that the old paint and varnish would be dropping off like leaves from a tree in the autumn...  But that stuff is definitely not a quick shot to the heart of the matter.

My first attempt with the chemical stripper, I spread it on thick over a few large areas of the boat, then went inside and diddled around for about 30 minutes; then went back out expecting everything to come off like the peel on an orange.  NOT!

One thing that happened was that the sun had gotten stronger and the stripper had dried in several places.  I took a scrubber to the varnished area and a lot of it flaked off, but the finish was only about 50% removed.  Areas with ancient old paint on them, less than half came off with an initial scraping with the putty knife.

I rinsed it all with mineral spirits per the instructions, which didn't seem to really do anything at all.  I think that step is probably more useful after you have virtually all the finish off and just want to clean it up some more.

It was then that I realized that this was going to be a lengthy project afterall...  I thought of putting a wire brush on my drill and going after the paint that way, but knew it would tear the heck out of the wood, which is fairly soft in many places.  I think a vibrating sander would be a hard way to go too because of all the pieces and seams.  So I tried a different approach with the stripper.

I sat down in the back of the boat and started painting on the chemical again, and where it didn't seem to be having much effect, kept painting the stuff on.  As I was able to scrape paint off, I'd suck up the globs with the shop vac, and then put more stripper on the part that hadn't dissolved that much.  I'd guess I spent at least a couple of hours on the back corner of the boat to get the results that show up in the picture.

Being that it's mid-April, it could easily be mid-June before all the finish is off, just mostly working weekends.  Or it could even be early fall, depending on what comes up in the meantime.  Oh well, it looks like it will be

"steady as she goes"!