My parents owned a furniture refinishing business and the first thing in that business is to strip off the old finish. Coincidentally enough that is known as both stripping and the most painful part of the business.
The chemical used to remove the old finish is this painful clear liquid that eats away at rubber, plastic and your flesh. This stuff was clear (at first) and had a slight soapy feel, before the pain that is. It was expensive so it was filtered and reused. The filtering was easy, it drained into a strainer and then into the recycle bucket. Once it had been filtered and reused the consistency changed, it went from being light and airy like gasoline to thin petroleum jelly; in other words it would stick to you even if you shook it off.
My parents were recycling before it was cool.
The standard procedure when stripping was to put on the rubber apron, face mask, rubber gloves, and rubber sleeve gaiters. The stripper would eat through the rubber gloves first. When you started to feel the burn in your fingers you would get your assistant to spray water into the gloves. If you got the stripper in your eyes then you yelled eyes, lifted the mask and turn to your right so you could get some water splashed in your face. You would be amazed how sensitive some parts of your body are; armpits are just as sensitive as your eyes with this stuff.
One day my father is stripping with my mother helping him. He gets the stripper in his eyes so he hollers out and lifts his mask. He also took a step off the platform. My mother is spraying him down and he's still hollering and then he starts to take off his pants. He stepped into the bucket of stripper and had stripper about two feet up his left leg. He was trying to tell my mother what happened but she was spraying water into face and couldn't understand him.
They eventually got him rinsed off and that is one of the handful of times that my father left work early.
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