I have an Old Building 100 yrs +/-
I would like to remove the exterior paint and keep the Look and integrety.

Sand blasting is one way. It's expensive.

The look will be different once you remove the paint Perito's suggestion of sand blasting is about the only cost effective way. Chemical strippers and power washing will be way too expensive.

Never Use silica sand for "sand Blasting" Just a note here guys In most areas sand blasting is illegal since we figured out it has Silica in it.

Aside from steel beads/ walnut shells etc "Black Beauty" is the best material to use and is safe. Specs on that is

0 reactivity
0 fire hazard
0 specific reactivity
0 Health hazard

Once in a while we still Aggregate blast here on paint jobs. Sand blasting is has been outlawed in our county on old buildings. The reasons is you do too much damage to the face of the brick and wear off the "Kiln" side of the brick ans expose the softer fired inside. It roughs up the brick too much, water freezes in the small pocked face left and takes off the bricks longevity. As much as 50 to 75 years wear off the brick.

The best thing to use is an actual "Steam Pressure washer and it may come completely off with just that. Or a stripper later for the tough spots and re blast.

If cold water is used a stripper and high pressure water blasting is in order.

Most all of our cities brick buildings are 100 yeas old and way over that

Have you all used baking soda blasting, seems to work well in auto refinishing and in use for graffiti removal.

Also there are commercial water blasting companies, ( not pressure washing) and I have seen them do the same work as a sand blaster but with no dust and in about 1/2 the time

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have you all used baking soda blasting, seems to work well in auto refinishing and in use for graffiti removal

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Hi Fr chuck. Is funny you mentioned that. The "black Beauty" I buy is from a trucking painting company that uses it to repaint tractor and trailers. I tried buying it direct because of the volume we use once in a while. It comes in 100lb bags and different otts

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What it is is Slag and has sharp edges to really cut fast. The difference in the sizes here really helps the tweak thing. We use 100 lb pods and an Ingersoll and rand compressor. The bags comes in 100lbs So it works well for me and solves containing the water runaway problem in the city/township. The last Job we had was 20 tons usage on a commercial building for a paint job..

We just taped and spray painted 4 lamps on the columns on our patio. I used Rustoleum (sp?) and on the first one I oversprayed quite a bit. I used mineral spirits and scrubbed it with a wire brush... came off beautifully... But, wear gloves to protect your hands.

Stringer