Wood stripping: soda blaster review

Bought a soda blaster.  Seemed like a cool idea for continuing to strip the woodwork in my front hall.  As you may have read here, I have tried five or six brands of chemical stripper but none of them was particularly effective.  The latest exciting idea was spray stripper.  No mucky brushes or dumping stripper out a gallon bucket.  Unfortunately the cans almost immediately clogged up and wouldn't spray.  So much for that.

So when I saw soda blasting on the internet I was pretty excited.  That didn't last long.

First of all the inexpensive model I bought had to be filled through the tiny little hole in the top.  A funnel, a scoop, and a chopstick.  The scoop to fill the funnel, the chopstick to poke at the soda so that it would flow down into the canister.  Took me about a half hour of filling and poking to get any sort of reasonable amount of soda into the unit.  OK, but if it works it will be totally worth it.

Five minutes later the canister is empty, the whole room has a fine layer of soda everywhere, the floor has a thick layer of soda, and the adjoining rooms also have fine layers of soda in spite of the plastic I hung over the doorway.

"Worth it?", you might ask.  You be the judge.  Keeping in mind that I had already done some chemical stripping on the frame, the main blasting was on the red circled areas.

The good news?  Harbor Freight put the money back on my credit card so now I don't have to pay for that.