No. I rarely strip anything.

And, I'm always skeptical of any product that says it will perform on virtually every substrate.

Try it and lay out a sample on the counter. Strip an old painted brick or block. *s*

Michael

I've had great success with the other Peel Away products and I'm hearing good things about Smart Strip. I haven't used it yet, though.

I have used Smart Strip to strip about 5 layers of paint off the ceiling of my 500 sf carport, which I'm converting to living space. I have a midcentury post and beam style rancher with cedar tongue-in-groove decking and fir beams.

It was a long process and took 2 separate applications because in our initial enthusiasm we applied the Smart Strip over too large an area and let it sit too long/dry out. We learned from our mistakes, scraped off what we could, and on the second go-round worked in small sections, prolonging the dwell time by covering the stripper with thin plastic. Dumond suggested this to me and it works just as well or better than the special paper they sell for this purpose.

Smart Strip is the first and only stripper I have ever used and it seems a very benign product; I would hate to think of tackling this job with something toxic. However, it is still a lot of work to remove the paint, especially since we are working overhead - and we have all those V grooves to contend with as well! Scraping the softened paint with a carbide scraper was followed by scrubbing the residue with an assortment of stiff brushes and soapy water; wiping down; scraping out the remaining stripper residue from the V grooves after it had sufficiently dried; then going over everything with a palm sander.

Having done all that, there were still some spots where we could not remove all the paint residue (i.e. a "tinge" remaining on the wood rather than solid paint) from the first coat of what was likely an oil-based paint, nor could we scrub out all the paint from knotholes, etc.

So now I am staining the beams and decking (dark brown and warm grey respectively) with SW Woodscapes solid stain, which seems like a very good product. We have begun the stripping process with the cedar decking on the soffits and the exposed beam ends outside ... even more of a challenge when you're working in front of a wall of windows. I'm sure it will be worth it in the end ... whenever that will be. This has turned out to be as much a restoration as a renovation.

We tried it today on brick that we painted a color it turned out we didn't like once it was on the house. It was just one coat of primer and one coat of satin latex. It didn't work for us. I just tried a three-brick section test, and while it did pull off a tad, I don't have hopes that it would ever restore the brick to anywhere near normal. We've decided to change the color and keep on painting.