Carpentry and Woodworking - deconstructing interior wooden doors

I'm stripping paint from my 1923 home's original Doug fir doors. The doors themselves are very plain, stiles and rails surround 1 flat center panel. There is no molding or additional pieces of trim.

The stripping is starting to grind me down because I have four more doors to go and I'm considering a local business that runs painted products through their dunk tanks at about $300 per door. Seems high in cost but maybe a fair trade for sanity preservation's sake.

Would it be possible to disasssemble these doors into their respective 5 pieces? I'd like to run the stiles and rails through my Makita planer. I'll still have to strip the center panel, but I'll take that as an acceptable offset if I can plane the paint off the other pieces.

I'll only be planing the wood down enough to remove the paint layer, approx. 1-2mm. I've been doing this for various pieces of molding and trim from other parts of the house and it works great.

Anyone have any ideas on knocking the doors apart? I have an identical additional door to practice on before I touch the originals.

I'd appreciate any comments or suggestions. Thanks

Back in the good ole days doors were built with deep tenons connecting the rails and styles, chances are high that these are built this way. There is no easy way to "unglue" the joint, plannng the door parts would also thin them down quite a bit making them weaker and not fitting back in the jam with the same type of reveals, I have sanded the rails and styles of 6 panels with some good results you need to start with 80 grit, stripping the inside corners would minimize your chemical exposure (you could sandthe main panel areas too) a Heat gun might be a alternative to chemicals.

What he said. And professional dipping usually leaves you no choice but painting, staining no longer works right. Grin and bear it, strip and sand, and you will be proud of those old doors.

I recently stripped the wood on a 36 Plymouth woody with a heat gun after experimenting with strippers, etc. Heat gun did the best job with least damage.

Thanks for the input, guys.

I broke out my propane canister and did some test paint melting/removing. Works a lot better than my cheapie electric heat gun.

*groan*

I'll try some more heating/scraping this weekend.

There are actually some GreatChemical Strippers now that not only work great but you spray on with a squirt bottle ,let set 10 mins,and remove the almost dry residue with a puttty knife . then a quick sand using a quality belt sander ( like a 4X24 porter cable)on the stiles and rails and followed up with a good Random orbital,some steel wool and solvent you could usually strip and sand a door in approx 2 1/2 -3 hrs each start to finish and ready for just about any finish stain or paint

The amount of work on the remaining number of doors in my house is daunting. I'm considering visiting the commercial dunk/strip service with my stack of doors. It would be expensive but time-efficient (I've used this service once years ago, the results were impressive and the door was about stain-ready on pickup).

Then I stumbled across this last night:

The Silent Paint Remover™*: Model 1100-14 (http://www.silentpaintremover.com./spr/index.htm)

Still requires work and time, but not as bad as the propane canisters or buckets of chemicals. Probably cheaper than the dunk service, I'll have to find out by how much.