Advice for smoke damaged linseed oil finish?

a month ago by lettruthout to c/woodworking

A hutch table made by my father in the 1960s with boiled linseed oil finish was damaged in a January 2025 California urban fire. It, and all other house contents, still emit a heavy toxic smell. Room surface tests have shown that lead and other metals are present.

I've successfully remediated a few other furniture pieces but they had been sealed with polyurethane (or similar). The visible surfaces of this hutch (all solid pine or oak) were finished in multiple layers of boiled linseed oil. The other surfaces (interior solid pine and drawer bottom plywood) are unfinished.

Am seeking remediation advice. How best to remove as much of linseed finish as possible - so that a fresh linseed finish can be applied? The hope being to remove most of the toxins and encapsulate the remaining.

For the rest: sealing the unfinished interior surfaces seems advisable but linseed in drawers is not recommended, right? So polyurethane there is the way to go?

Any thoughts would be appreciated. My father was better at this than I am!

yngmar 6 points a month ago

@lettruthout Scrape it off. Bahco 665 is my favourite tool for that. Be careful not to dig in the corners or grind them off first. Sometimes a hot air gun can help.

Then you can optionally use a card scraper to make it real nice and then revarnish it. I love using LeTonkinois but any other boiled liness/tung oil varnish should do and gives great results. Five coats minimum and patience, it's one coat per day.

Why not in drawers?! No stinky chemicals in traditional varnish, only smells good :)

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lettruthout 3 points a month ago

Varnish, instead of polyurethane, looks interesting to seal the unfinished interior surfaces. But since the visible surfaces were finished with linseed oil only, I'd like to stick with that instead of varnish. I'd be afraid of using such scrapers on the soft pine!

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tburkhol 4 points a month ago

If you can master the card/cabinet scraper, it's much safer that a paint scraper - much more of a finishing tool than a stripping tool. Straight BLO, with no varnish, isn't going to be a film amenable to paint scraper, anyway: you'll need to remove some wood to get the contaminated finish out, and a card scraper will do that thousandth-of-an-inch at a time, without kicking up the dust that sandpaper would.

eg: https://taytools.com/...

Stumpy Nubs' howto: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S7ZyFT24oOc

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lettruthout 4 points a month ago

That guy is great! (But he needs more hand planes. 😀 )

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yngmar 4 points a month ago

@lettruthout Boiled linseed oil is a basic varnish (drying oil).

Scraping is inevitable. Sanding will not work as it will just clog the paper. There are chemical strippers but they tend to make an epic mess.

Just scrape with feeling. That's why this particular scraper is good, it has the second handle to apply measured downpressure. Any small scratches you can then sand off or clean up with the card scraper.

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autriyo 2 points a month ago

I've definitely refinished oil coatings with sanding, but you're going to need a lot of sandpaper...

It's not impossible, but also not very efficient.

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zelahdieliekeis 2 points a month ago

If you saturate it with fresh linseed that might help the smelly stuff to migrate out by diffusion. Rinse and repeat. Also that stuff is very flammable.

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