I was stripping paint today with a heat gun, something I have a lot of practice with. Still I realize that it does have the potential to set your house on fire, which is what I did today. The piece I was working on had a strip of lead flashing on it for weather proofing. The board was pretty rotten and I wanted to get down to bare wood so I could fill it with epoxy consolidant. As I was going along I noticed that it was smoking and it looked like it was actually starting to char. So I sprayed some water on it to cool it off but it kept smoking. I started digging out the rotten wood and saw that the charred portion went quite deep into the wood, almost as if it was burning from the middle out. Then it dawned on me that the lead flashing had transferred a lot of heat into the numerous nails that held it on, and that in turn started a fire in the middle of the rotten section. At this point I started thinking how embarrassing it would be to have to call the fire department and so I just ripped the whole piece off of the house. I decided that it wasn’t worth trying to fix because it was so rotten anyways, and there was another piece next to it that had suffered the same fate so it’s going to get replaced. Hey, the house is 120 years old, this stuff happens. But now I need to find a place to get true 1″ dimensional lumber.