Glass Out

A flurry of activity today. Alan and I discussed progress and decided we needed to improve our paint stripping performance. It is jolly hard, and is an awful lot of effort for slow progress. I am keen to remove all glass (small and large) as it will make scraping much easier. Alan suggested we try cordless drills with wire brushes. Today we removed all the large panes in the west facing side, and looked at what we could do with the smaller panes. The problem with the smaller panes is that generally, they still have the original glass in them. This is brittle and will break easily (as we accidentally found out when trying to remove one of the few plastic panes).

We think we have virtually zero chance of removing any small panes without breaking them, so we will look at what we can do with them in place. The overall quality of the job would be better if we could remove them, but the budget doesn't allow for an extra 48 panes of glass. We shall try and fully clean up a pane, using a stanley knife to remove the red paint from where it has been previously painted and see how good it looks once cleaned up.

Did a lot more paint removing today. The wire brushes on the drills works a treat and I think we should be in a position to red oxide the west facing side next weekend.

The attached picture shows the progress made on stripping paint. Alan is crouched down having just broken one of the small panes. The glass shatters and ends up everywhere and stuck in the frame. What you can't see from the picture is that I've started stripping the paint from the crown.

I'm quite confident now that we'll get this finished by mid May.