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I'm sure that works great.........but, I'd get stripper somewhere it wasn't supposed to be.

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I didn't mean to say it, but I meant what I said.
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A chemical stripper will soften the finish slightly beyond the contact area of the chemical. Plus the chance of accidental spillage or unintended contact is too high in my opinion. If you take your time and carefully and precisely scrape back you may spend an hour doing so. If you rout the finish off you may spend 20 min. If you goof and spill a chemical finish where you don’t want it you will spend days at repairing and curing and if on a nitro finish you have lost a month.

The only time I would consider a chemical stripper appropriate would be to take a guitar back to white. And even then there is the chance that you can cause color bleed and plastic purfling melt. So In my opinion chemical stripping is seldom a good idea.

Gee ! I stay away a few days , and some of you are still answering my question ! LOL thanks again to everyone for their ideas and techniques, I thought about the strippr also , I think David LaPlante mentioned doing so in his " an alternative appraoch to french polishing" seminar at the ASIA symposium. he didnt go into detail about it though . I still have a couple weeks before the finish will be hard enough to work with, so a descision is still a bit of time off ! thanks again to every who replied ! Jody

Jody fell free to choose your own method that said If French polishing just be aware the alcohol will cause the tape to bleed adhesive. Some worse than others. Once the adhesive bleeds out the odds are very high that you will at best contaminate your muneca and likely your film as well. It may be helpful to paint on a 1# cut around the perimeter of masking tape and let it harden over night before starting any boding sessions. but personally, 35 years of French polishing tells me to stay away using masking tape and alcohol in a rubbing process.

Mike thanks for the advice, I already tried pretaping the bridge area which left a horrible outline ,I am probably not doing french polish in the traditional or "proper" way. just a mesh of techniques glommed from various sources along the way , which is coming out nice and shiny, so far without any pumice or sanding of the finished surfaces.the back and sides I had coated nicely in about six hours, the top has been a bit more of a challange, for several reasons such as the bridge outline etc , Jody