How to Use a Heat Gun to Remove Paint

Series Summary

Home improvement and maintenance is a great way to repair and replace broken items in a home. Additionally, home remodeling can bring an outdated home to contemporary standards or can maintain the classic or historical look of the home. Home repair is often the last thing homeowners want to spend money and time on. However, as many DIYers know, homeowners can do their own home repair with instructions from home renovation and construction professionals. In this free video series on home repair, a carpenter and construction specialist offers information on various home repair projects. Find out how to replace a fuse, and get information on repairing a sanding belt. Find out how to choose the right router bit for a woodworking project, and even remove paint using a heat gun. Fix things around the house, one project at a time, using this helpful guide.

Video Transcript

"Hello, my name is Mark Blocker, in this segment we're going to cover how to remove paint using a heat gun. OK, to remove paint from a board using a heat gun, we're going to need to have a heat gun and some scrapers and first before I start off, let me give you a little warning about the heat gun. They look very similar to a blow dryer used for drying your hair, they're actually much different, they create a lot more heat, don't ever attempt to try and blow dry your hair with it, direct exposure to your skin, they get very hot and will burn you. What we're going to do is we're going to heat up a section here until the paint becomes very soft from the heat, it will start to bubble. When that happens you can use a scraper to remove the heat itself, I'll give a quick demonstration. We want to hold the heat gun just a few inches away from the item. It's going to take just a couple of minutes here to heat this up. You see how the paint starts to blister from the heat? OK as you can see on camera as I'm heating this up, the paint will start to expand and come up, that's from the moisture in the wood. The bubbling effect is caused by air trapped inside the, underneath the paint as I heat it up it expands lifting the paint from the wood. Now I simply take a putty knife and scrape that right off and we just want to continue working that right on down the wood. As you you use the paint gun to heat it up, you can easily scrape it off. Just continue this process until you removed all the paint from the wood then you can just lightly sand off the remaining. OK, that's how you remove paint from wood using a heat gun."