Has anyone else tried the product from Dumond, called Smart Strip? It's a water-based stripper that is non caustic. Looks kind of like shaving cream and smells like old fashioned wallpaper paste.

It seems to work for me, but is expensive (comes out to about $1 per square foot of stripped surface), so I have had to apply it sparingly. The instructions recommend washing off the residue with a power washer afterwards, but no neutralisation is necessary.

This is an outdoor project, old pine drop siding with about 75 years of accumulation. Some of the old paint is still adhered fast to the wood, but other flakes right off, and it is difficult to ascertain how tightly it is adhering, before removing. I repainted the same building about 15 years ago, and most of the paint failure has occurred where old paint was left on, so I am trying to get down to bare wood, although time and patience don't permit removing every last molecule of the old paint.

I tried water blasting, but soon discovered that there is a very fine line of distinction between the pressure and angle of application required to remove adhering paint, and what it takes to damage the surface of the wood, so I am now using the washer only to blast off very loose peeling paint, and to clean off the residue afterwards.

I tried an infra-red paint remover gadget that worked well on my house, but with this job, I would be probably still be working 5 years from now. Except for the loosly peeling areas, dry scraping with a metal scraper is about as useful as scraping the wall with my fingernails.

I just wonder if anyone has tried anything similar to this product, and if the new paint adhered ok afterwards. October is normally a dry, low-humidity month, so I plan to let it dry at least a couple of weeks before repainting. The product is used like regular paint stripper, without the Peel Away paper required for similar products made by the same company.

The only success I have had so far in preparing this building (about 1500 square feet of surface area) has been a combination of dry scraping, water blasting, infra-red and the Smart Strip stuff. Just wish the stripper weren't so expensive.

Don