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Soy-Gel Paint Stripper

Jun 21, 2016 | Expert's Corner | 0 comments

The soy-gel paint stripper sold by The Finishing Store is an excellent product. It uses n-methyl pyrrolidone (NMP) as the active stripping ingredient. Many of the most effective alternative strippers (alternative to methylene-chloride and flammable-solvent strippers) are based on NMP.

You need to be aware, however, that NMP works slowly, much more slowly than methylene chloride or flammable solvents. In the early 1990s, a number of manufacturers introduced stripping products based on NMP and claimed working times similar to methylene-chloride and flammable-solvent strippers. This resulted in NMP strippers getting the reputation of “not working,” and the market dried up.

Slow working is related to slow evaporating, and slow evaporation is the real advantage of soy-gel paint remover. If you give it time, it will remove five or ten coats of paint with only one application. You can’t do this with the faster-evaporating, traditional paint strippers. They evaporate so fast that you don’t have time to remove more than a coat or two at a time. You’re always fighting the fast evaporation rate.

Soy-gel won’t evaporate from the surface for days, so the trick using this stripper is to test now and then with a putty knife to see if all the coats have been loosened from the wood. For many coats of paint, it may take a day or two for this to happen. But once it has, the coats of paint are easy to remove.