In article , dpb wrote:
Doug Miller wrote:
In article , "Don Phillipson"
wrote:
Brick is so porous
any paint that sticks to it becomes irremovable except
by scraping.

That's not true.

1. In my first house, some knucklehead previous owner had painted over a
brick
fireplace. Four applications of methylene chloride-based paint remover
(ZipStrip brand specifically) removed _every_trace_ of paint.

2. Three blocks south of where I live now, some idiot had years ago painted
an
entire brick house. The current owner had it sandblasted just last week, and
(from the street, at least) you can't tell it had ever been painted.

3. I would find it entertaining to watch you trying to scrape paint off of a
brick.

The success of removing paint from brick depends greatly on the
particular brick and paint...

Brick w/ a fired face has fairly low porosity and a relatively smooth
surface to stripper can work pretty effectively.

You might be surprised at what ZipStrip can pull out of even rough and porous
brick.

Sandblasting can work on the surface of about anything, of course, but
if it is a really rough, pourous surface and they happened to use a
thinner paint that got really taken up, it'll probably be impossible to
remove it all in any practical sense.

Some brick is soft enough that couldn't use sandblasting without
basically taking the brick, too...

In short, there are almost as many possible outcomes as there are
applications...

Just a gripe against over-generalization in general, nothing else...

Quite true; I didn't mean to appear to be suggesting that paint could *always*
be removed from brick, just that "never" isn't the case at all.

--
Regards,
Doug Miller (alphageek at milmac dot com)

It's time to throw all their damned tea in the harbor again.