[Ron Ramirez]

Please explain your comment regarding polyurethane. Why would this be a problem if I plan to totally strip the cabinet?

Please read the link Russ provided just above to his blog (post #15, first page, this thread). Russ is an expert cabinet refinisher as well as a great restorer overall and he knows what he is talking about. As he says, removal of polyurethane is a really slow pain. And it requires MEK strippers which have been mostly pulled off the market because of idiots who were stripping indoors and killing themselves with the resulting noxious fumes.

[Arran]

I heard that the German sets often used polyester resin, kind of like fiberglass gel coat . In any event I think it's catalyzed, whatever the stuff is,  and hard to get off. I wonder if scuffing up the surface of either would make it easier to strip off, with something like steel wool or a finer grit of sandpaper, that trick works on stripping off powder coating that has gone bad.
Regards
Arran

[John Bartley]

There was a product that I used fifteen years ago that would strip anything, including polyurethane products. It was bio-degradeable, water soluble, essentially odorless and could be left to dry on a surface, then wetted and reactivated without damage. Sounds too good to be true? It was EXPENSIVE, but it worked ...

It was called Multi-Strip-Pro and came from a company called "Back To Nature". I don't know if its still available in the USA. It appears NOT to be in Canada :

https://www.sunnysidecorp.com/products.php?p=r