How to Strip Stain From Wood : Furniture Repair Tips

[Music] hi i'm todd langwell the flying furniture guy from r d wood shop in scotia new york today i'm going to show you how to strip stain from wood you see i have a nice oval table here now if you only want to work on the top of the table plastic off the skirt and down with paper and tape to save your the rest of the table if you don't want to work on it at this point once you get everything taped off i'm only going to do half of this surface so you can see the contrast you can take your paste stripper you can pour it right on take an old garbage brush push it around leaving that paste stripper on there nice thick even coat all the way around it now the thing about paste stripper is that once you put it on you want to leave it alone the key to the paste stripper is leaving it on there at least 15 to 20 minutes to give it chance to work and not being impatient going back and forth over the top of it trying to test the finish to see if it's coming off you can see it's already starting to work in some areas and those areas are becoming dry very quickly and what you want to do for those areas that are drying out very quickly is you want to put a little bit more stripper over the top without really scratching it you want to very very lightly pull that stripper back over to wet the areas that are dry and you can see the entire area is is really almost all gone as far as the finish goes although it's still on the surface and what you want to do at this point is you want to take a scraper but you want to make sure that your scraper is it's got a dull edge you don't want any real sharp corners on it because this kind of softens the wood a little bit and you can gouge the wood pretty easily during this part of the process working from one side i like to catch the stripper underneath the table as it flows off you can see how soft this gets because it's you can feel it with your scraper the wood is so fresh and new right there underneath that you can easily gouge this table and create more damage so once you get 90 of it off the next part is to take a medium course or a coarse steel wool you can apply the stripper back to the table a little bit you're then going to take the steel wool and you're going to give it a good once over you can go across grain but i would recommend going with the grain whenever you can because you'll see the scratch marks eventually if you keep going across grain if you think you need a little bit more stripper you can see how fast it clogs the stripper that's all the stain finish and residue that gets caught up inside the stripper or gets caught up inside the steel wool so you can rotate your steel wool around as well apply a little bit more okay now once you're at this part of the process there's a couple of different ways that you can that you can continue to get the stripper residue off at this point after your steel wool you have to neutralize the stripper there's a couple of different ways that you can neutralize the stripper if you can you can use water you can just use a rag there's a little bit more sanding involved if you just use a rag you can also use steel wool to neutralize and i'll show you the difference real quick here having sawdust having used sawdust you can see i can dry this piece of furniture right away if i've got sawdust to use if i don't want to use sawdust i use water and a rag to neutralize the stripper and wipe the whole thing back down with water to get the stripper residue off of there because it will make the sanding process a little easier okay after you've neutralized the stripper you can take another piece of steel wool medium coarse or sandpaper you can go right back over this table to work the areas that need a little bit more attention okay after the steel wool i like to let it dry for at least 24 hours before i start to sand it and the reason is is because if you don't what's going to happen is that your sandpaper is going to get clogged up with a stripper residue and any remaining stain a lot faster but i just want to show you real quick the contrast that you can get by adding a little sandpaper after the stripping process and how bright you can make this and get the remaining stain out of this piece of wood you can see the sandpaper clogs up pretty fast so rotate your sandpaper often when you've got the edge just take care of the edge as normal another key point is you're better off using some type of stripper to get the finish off than using straight sandpaper to sand off the finish because what's going to happen is you're going to create more damage and you're going to lose the profile and the definitions on your furniture if you sand off the finish you're better off slightly stripping it sanding it slightly and then putting new stain and polyurethane over the top of it you can definitely see the contrast from what's been stripped to what hasn't been stripped and how much stain we removed off of this piece of furniture i'm todd langwell the flying furniture guy and this was how to strip stain from wood you

Channel: ehowathomechannel

Views: 3,035,150

Rating: 4.8725553 out of 5

Keywords: maple wood, water stain, furniture repair, wood furniture, wood stain, repairing furniture, fixing furniture, broken furniture, splintered wood, cracked wood, damaged furniture

Id: bV74s1zo4a0

Length: 8min 42sec (522 seconds)

Published: Mon Dec 10 2012