You think burnt toast is bad?

This is very likely what will happen when an unskilled worker is left on his own to strip paint from wood.  He will burn the wood. And given the slurry of melting paint he creates in the removal process, he won’t even realize he is burning the wood. Not until the heat gun paint removal is followed up by chemical stripping will the burn marks show up.

We once worked on a jobsite where a low budget, unskilled crew of workers was hired to do paint removal. Not until after they had completed finish removal on the ten 12-foot long mahogany beams that ran the length and width of the living room ceiling did the architect and contractor discover they had burned the wood. Every one of the beams had multiple burn marks like the ones pictured above.  But these burn marks go deep into the wood. Most often, they can’t be sanded out. We were then hired to hand scrape all the burn marks with cabinet scrapers like the one pictured here.

Image of Scraping Wood by Just plain Bill (Own work) CC BY-SA 4.0-3.0-2.5-2.0-1.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0-3.0-2.5-2.0-1.0)], via Wikimedia Commons