Wood Stripping Art

Wood Stripping Art, a set on Flickr.

I have been putting together an album of photos called 'Wood Stripping Art' on flickr and facebook. Ok, so I know i am probably pretty 'out there' with this idea, but it seems to me that sometimes the patterns that appear when wood is being stripped look like art. Check it out and tell me, what do you think?

A Window With a Mistaken Identity

A strange thing happened this week in our stripping tanks.  We have some old woodwork for a house that we have been stripping the paint off of.  Two of the items were these windows, which looked like ordinary glass in a painted wood frame.   What we found out, was that one was in fact Plexi-Glass!  Coulda fooled us.

The door to the left has the real glass the way it came to us, the door to the right has the plexi-glass after it was put through our tanks and we discovered it was in fact NOT glass.    After putting it in our Methylene Chloride tank the 'glass' became discolored, stretched out, and flexible.   It has been a few days and it is still flexible in fact!  It feels like something at a creepy playhouse for kids where you have to avoid flying green gooo.

Of  course the window that was real glass went through the process just fine.

So I guess this post is another one of my cautionary tales.  You probably assume that your windows are made out of real glass, but if you have any suspicion that it might be something else, let us know so that we can handle your piece accordingly.