redoing my floors this week and I've never thought about why small areas that I've refinished were such a burden, but I took a little alcohol to the floors and found that they are shellac.
So instead of using a floor sander that I bought - this whole job is expedited by a schedule to get it done before the spouse returns - I have a combination of goo and a million little staples to remove along with the carpet that was on the floor. The goo is some kind of degradation like tar and I'm just scraping the whole lot off.
I have about 5 or so vintage scrapers that were designed for floors and they work OK, but realized this morning that I could take advantage of the very hard cheap chinese HSS irons and greatly extend the sharpening interval. This is something I'd not consider, but I'm using them to scrape, and they do last well and I don't have to get up off of the floor nearly as often to refresh them. They're also indifferent to the heat generated by scraping.
I found no real suggestions for this (the shellac is coming off, no way around it, it's not just getting cleaned - the wife has a specific look that she wants and I'm using solvent types.
It occurred to me that while I'll be scraping about 500 SF, and then have some more area that's under WB finish that I've done in the past (that sands fine) , this would be a difficult job without hand skills and toolmaking ideas.
The staples for the padding are in deep, and I also reprofiled a high quality prying tool -it's basically sharp now - aside from the physical part of scraping bare 200 SF or so last night, and doing the same thing tonight, and then the rest tomorrow, it's not really too unpleasant. I feel like I could make a standing push tool to do this, but there won't be time. Thus far, I did already make one, but the handle ends up being the weak point and the effort to make such a thing with a heavy handle isn't in the cards here.
the option to have someone else do this was also out for me - the guy wanted us to remove the furniture from the house, put it in a storage unit so that he wouldn't have too tight of timing constraints, and then he wanted to use WB finish. The amount of nuisance would be at least as high or higher even if it would've been a lot less work. I don't like getting cheated out of projects.
So instead of using a floor sander that I bought - this whole job is expedited by a schedule to get it done before the spouse returns - I have a combination of goo and a million little staples to remove along with the carpet that was on the floor. The goo is some kind of degradation like tar and I'm just scraping the whole lot off.
I have about 5 or so vintage scrapers that were designed for floors and they work OK, but realized this morning that I could take advantage of the very hard cheap chinese HSS irons and greatly extend the sharpening interval. This is something I'd not consider, but I'm using them to scrape, and they do last well and I don't have to get up off of the floor nearly as often to refresh them. They're also indifferent to the heat generated by scraping.
I found no real suggestions for this (the shellac is coming off, no way around it, it's not just getting cleaned - the wife has a specific look that she wants and I'm using solvent types.
It occurred to me that while I'll be scraping about 500 SF, and then have some more area that's under WB finish that I've done in the past (that sands fine) , this would be a difficult job without hand skills and toolmaking ideas.
The staples for the padding are in deep, and I also reprofiled a high quality prying tool -it's basically sharp now - aside from the physical part of scraping bare 200 SF or so last night, and doing the same thing tonight, and then the rest tomorrow, it's not really too unpleasant. I feel like I could make a standing push tool to do this, but there won't be time. Thus far, I did already make one, but the handle ends up being the weak point and the effort to make such a thing with a heavy handle isn't in the cards here.
the option to have someone else do this was also out for me - the guy wanted us to remove the furniture from the house, put it in a storage unit so that he wouldn't have too tight of timing constraints, and then he wanted to use WB finish. The amount of nuisance would be at least as high or higher even if it would've been a lot less work. I don't like getting cheated out of projects.
