48 Paint stripping tin pressed ceilings

Paint stripping tin pressed ceilings:

House Muschamp has stunning tin pressed ceilings; including ceiling sheets, cornices and corner pieces.     Most of the ceilings came off nicely in the deconstruction and the reinstatement of the tin pressed ceilings is an essential element in the rebuild.

All ceilings have a couple of layers of paint and some of the relief in the sheets already has faded away by the thick paint.

The ceilings require paint stripping.

All ceiling elements are taken down now and they can be worked on in a workshop, making this is a good time to prepare them for reuse. 

I have looked into different methods to paint strip the thin metal sheets.

Heat gun and scraping: 

The heat gun works and chunks of paint layers can be removed.

Scraping scretches the metal and tends to deform relief in the sheets when some pressure is put on them. 

When working with the heat gun I discovered a layer of paint containing lead.

Paint remover:

Several layers of paint can be removed in one treatment.

Chemical paint stripping is a messy job and the procedure needs to be repeated two or three times.

The water required to rinse off the paint remover and paint is heavily polluted and makes the sheets go rust.

Sand / dry ice blasting:

With paint on the one side and rust on the other side it is hard to determine the quality of the metal sheet in-between.

Without having spare sheets available for testing the risk was that blast pressure require to removed the paint would blast through the sheets.

I enquired some quotes and this option appeared to be quite expensive - without a guarantied result.

Liquid Nitrogen:

By freezing sheets the paint cracks and bursts off.

My preferred method since it’s clean and environmentally friendly.

However I could find a company in New Zealand that could do it.

I myself have no experience with using liquid nitrogen and I couldn’t find in depth documentation for the procedure.

The investments to get started are pretty steep and I have no spare sheets to experiment with.

In January 2019 I decided to contract a professional paint stripper in Christchurch for paint removal.

The paint is removed in chemical baths and under environmentally controlled circumstances.

Finally the sheets are cleaned by water blasting and then dipped in ionised water to prevent them from rusting.

When visiting the workshop at a random moment, the ceilings had not gone through all baths yet.

Most of the paint was taken off but the sheets still had a dark colour instead of a light silver grey colour.

I actually liked the industryal, dark, steel look and asked the contrator to stop processing.