I purchased ~1,000 sf of maple gym floor from a school that they were demolishing in our town to complete the first floor of our remodel. My wife attended the school when she was a kid, so sort of sentimental.

Anyway, I'm to the point where I am starting to prep this for install. I figured I could just run it through my planer to remove the old finish down to fresh maple. Wrong. It's killing my knives instantly. I get nicks in the knives after running just a couple 4' boards through. Not sure if the poly is just that hard or if there were contaminants of some sort on the board. I'm 99.9% sure there were no nails or stones. I'm hesitant to continue with this process wondering how many knives I'll have to go through to get all 1,000 sf stripped.

My first question is, what would be the best method for stripping this old finish?

1. Keep planing & clean up the imperfections when I sand after install?

2. Just install it & strip the finish with an aggressive grit drum sander?

My second question pertains to cleaning the edges. They have some dirt & poly that have obviously creeped down in the seams of the floor over the years. I need to clean this off before installation to get a nice tight joint. So far I just scraped it off with a putty knife. Is there a quicker way to do this?

Thanks in advance for the help!