In Which The Front Door Is Stripped

Ever since I replaced the lockset on the front door, I've been meaning to patch up the large oval hole and mortise that the old lockset required. I used a rectangular cedar dutchman to fill the oval, but it wasn't a tight fit and it left some of the under-layers of paint exposed. And after 90 odd years, there were quite a few layers, both inside and out. From outermost layer in, the interior had a cream enamel layer, then a white enamel layer, then a salmon-y pink latex layer, then an off white high lead content layer. The exterior had a gooey dark grey latex layer, an even gooier maroon latex layer, then a purple layer of some sort, then a dark green (classic turn of the century color) then a layer of white primer and putty.

I only have in progress  pictures of the exterior since I was trying to control the lead while stripping the door.

I used an IR heater for stripping because they are supposed to work miracles and are theoretically safe when it comes to lead paint. Man oh man, it sure wasn't as easy as they make it look in the videos. The interior latex paint came off easy enough, but the lead base layer wasn't really affected unless I held the IR lamp super close and I started burning and bubbling the lead. Since I was trying to avoid lead vapor generation, I left the base layer of lead paint alone and vowed to cover it up with primer as quickly as possible. It wasn't chalky, but it could be rubbed off in spots with considerable ease.

The darker spots are where I had the heat on  bit too long and the paint started to char...

The exterior was much harder to strip as the layers never became loose enough for me to use a 5-in-1 like on the interior. I had to go at it with a carbide scraper (from the floor refinishing), most likely generating lead dust anyway. The IR stripper did help: in some places, it caused 100% adhesion failure, but only within the bubble, so it left a patchwork of paint that was still fully or partially adhered to the substrate. The heat also softened everything up and loosed the adhesion so the carbide scraper could do its thing. I just don't know how much more effective it was than a heat gun since I had to hold it to smoke temperature to make any real headway.
On both sides, the worst part was the molding profile. Each side took a full day just cleaning up the molding as best as I could, and I'm still not entirely satisfied with the result.

The following picture is interesting in that you can see multiple iterations of the lock-set cutouts and mounting, with the standard 2 1/8" circle currently standard.