The summer os 2020 I started stripping a century of chipped paint off a rusting steam pipe in my bathroom. A pipe is a very hard thing to strip. It’s curved.
It took a lot of effort and chemicals, but I got it stripped, sanded, primed and painted by the fall. Then the heat came on for the first time, and blisters appeared.
Most of the blisters were around the heavily pitted area closest to the floor. The previous owner had wrapped two layers of sisal rope around the pipe to act as protective insulation. Water had been soaking the rope, and flowing to the lowest level, for who knows how long.
I tried to fix the situation. But with the heat coming on regularly there wasn’t much I could do. Time had run out. I put some more acrylic primer on the parts I was trying to work on, and left it for later. It looked bad, but wasn’t going to get any worse.
Now, it is two years later. I know more about stripping, I have a Dremel tool to deal with the deeper rust, and I know about Rust-Oleum.
Temperatures have been dropping. i don’t have much time to work.
For the past week I have been re-stripping off the paint and primer from two years ago. Stripping paint is miserable work. Strenuous. And in the end you get a pile of what can only be described as toxic chewing gum.
On Saturday I locked myself in the bathroom and abraded the last problem areas with the Dremel tool. The whole room was covered in rust dust. By that evening I had given it a last sanding and Rust-Oleumed it. Now came the primer.
I had bought a new can of primer on Friday evening from a reputable store. I needed a new 32 oz can of Ultra Spec DTM acrylic primer. I was told in the store it was no longer made. Instead they sold me what they assured me was the same thing. Something called STIX. By the time this STIX had dried on Saturday night I could see it was not what I wanted. Rust was breaking out all over it.
An entire week’s work obliterated.
On Sunday I realized what I had to do. I had to strip it for a third time. I compressed a full week of work into one day. In the early hours I went to bed with a sore throat. I woke up this morning feeling dead. Not dizzy or spaced-out, but like I wasn’t getting enough oxygen. I think the fumes from the stripper dissolved all my mucus membranes. Today I had a cough and the symptoms of a cold as my lungs cleaned themselves out. And with all the sanding and stripping I’ve been doing over the past week, my iPhone no longer recognizes my fingerprints.
Today I sanded it once more, Rust-Oleumed it once more and primed it once more. This time I bought a Coronado alkyd primer. I think this is going to work.
Epilogue:
Have you ever thought about the smell of Rust-Oleum? When you first start working with it the smell is revolting. Like potato salad pulled out of a trash can. But then, after a while, it starts to become appetizing.
