I’m told by the maritime museum that the wheel is approximately 200 years old but the previous owner painted it with lead paint and my thoughts are that a ships wheel that old should not have been painted just left in it’s natural state or a timber stain.
my goal is to strip all the paint off back to natural, turn 5 outer legs in the same design as the spokes to support the outside and another larger one to support the centre hub.
when I started to strip the paint off I found that, being lead based, I couldn’t use heat because it melted the lead deeper into the wood grain and a mild paint stripper discoloured the timber so I have just scraped the paint off with the edge of a wood chisel but then when sanding there is still some paint in the grain of the timber and so after all the paint is scraped off I’m going to have a go at sand blasting to see how that works out.
After all this is finished I would like to get a sheet of glass across the top and make a coffee table
