Originally Posted by
Jeff Wills
I've gone to auto parts stores and had them hot tank steel frames to strip the paint. This is caustic soda in hot water- probably not as hot as your camp fire. It gets the vast majority of paint off the frame, only leaving detail work in the corners of lugs and such. It beats messing around with paint stripper goop.
Um, hot water is, by definition (at normal pressure) less than 100 degrees. Wood fires are 600 degrees and up.
Yes it's cooler (but a wood fire is not six times hotter - do I need to say that?).
And annealing temperatures for steel are from about 300 up, so no, fire is not a Good Thing for bike frames.