I'm redoing this car, a '97 XJS, and got over my head and it is now worth a lot less than I have into it. So instead of taking a loss I've decided to give the car to a family member. The paint is great and all the mechanicals work. I'm even getting the wheels "spun" and re-cleared.

One of the last pieces of the puzzle should have been easy but t has proved to be a real bear. The wood trim on just the doors, four pieces, was badly cracked. I've worked with wood my entire life so it should be easy to refinish, right? Wrong.

The veneer is super thin so I'd much rather chemically strip the finish. After a light sanding to "open up" the finish I've tried two different chemicals from Lowes and neither put a dent in the stuff. Earlier today I tried Airplane Remover from O'Reilly Auto Parts and that took off maybe 2% of its thickness. At that rate I'll be dead before I'm done so I went to Youtube and some nice gentleman was using heat from a clothes iron, softening the polyester and stripping it off that way. So I heated up an old ski wax iron and tried that. This caused the finish to "pop" in small circles, so I concentrated on one small area to try get a lot of circles to coalesce. I did that but the stuff is still stuck on even in that area. More Airplane on top of that, soaking for 45 minutes and again, nothing.

And yes, I did search this forum and found links to two pro-finishers but I'm mainly strapped for time and just need to get this done. My sister is planning on picking up the car in three weeks and one of those weeks I'm going to be out of town.

If I can't get these stripped than I might just as well sand them. Chances are very good that I'll burn past the hard polyester and ruin the veneer, and if that happens I'll go with piano black for these four pieces.

Any advice on chemical stripping of this factory wood finish will be much appreciated.

 

Use heat gun and scraper, it’s the quickest way to safely remove the polyester 👍

 

I have been using this heat gun and scraper for years.
I have restored several XJ6 wood dash panels using this method.