About : standard furniture application
Title : standard furniture application
standard furniture application
marc: welcome to a third episode of the wood whisperer video podcast. today we're going to cover atopic that can be frustrating, perplexing, dangerousand extremely rewarding all at the same time,and that's refinishing. my original intention wasto keep these videos in a nice and neat order,starting with milling lumber and then moving on tosome more complex topics. but my plans were unexpectedlychanged recently when
a last-minute refinishingjob came into the shop. some of you know this alreadybut as soon as your family, friends and neighbors hearthat you work with wood, you're bound to get somerequests for refinishing. it's up to you whether or not you even want to embark on that path. but refinishing jobsare a great way to make a few bucks with verylittle material investment, and they're also a means to practice your
troubleshooting and your finishing skills. and let me tell you, once you refinish a few pieces you'llhave a real appreciation for how simple it is to finish new wood. and as you'll see,refinishing projects also teach us a lot aboutwoodworking in general. we can really absorb a great deal of wisdom from these old pieces of furniture. what's that? you wantto give me some wisdom?
(swinging saxophone music) i'm pretty sure i'm an embarrassment to the entire woodworking world. inspecting an old piece offurniture like this gives us a chance to observehow well certain types of joinery hold up toyears of use and abuse. i haven't been woodworkinglong enough to see how my techniques hold up after 30 years, but with a 30-year-old piece of furniture,
i can quickly see what joinerytruly stands the test of time. as a result i'm preventing asmart-ass guy like myself from pointing and laughing at myfailures 30 years from now. as i see it, refinishingmay not be the most fun way to spend yourtime, but motivators like money and knowledge areenough for me to take on just about any refinishingjob that comes along. put on your respiratorsand gloves and let's get ready to point and laugh at someone
else's mistakes, becauseit's refinishing time. although most of what ido is custom furniture, i occasionally have theopportunity to work on a refinishing project,such as this antique table. what i'm going to dotoday is take you through the various steps of analyzing this table, determining what might be wrong with it, where we can actuallyincrease the stability and also address issues with the finish.
deciding what type offinish this actually is, and even more importantlysometimes, determining if this is a veneer or if it's solidwood, because the two things are going to be very differentin how we treat them. one of the first thingsi like to do when i get a piece like this in theshop is turn it over, i want to see what's on the underside. usually there are some telltalesigns on how the table was made, what type of materialit is, how it was stained.
i do see evidence of that here so let's check out some of these details. the first thing that i noticewhen i look at the underside of this table is the factthat there is pretty much mahogany everywhere, andthat's a really good sign. in a lot of cases when thetable has a veneer on the top, you look at the undersideand you'll see that it doesn't look like asame species of wood. that's a telltale signthat it is a high-quality
veneer on top, but theyused a lower-quality veneer, some other species, onthe bottom of the table. the fact that i see mahoganyhere is a really good sign and tells me that we could bea little bit more aggressive with our techniques forremoving the finish, because we don't have to worry aboutburning through a veneer. i also noticed that the leaf mechanism is stored under the table. we'll show you how thatworks later, but essentially
the two leaves on the sidespull apart and this middle piece folds out and expandsto take up that gap. another thing i notice on the underside of the table is the fact that somebody was a little bit messy with their staining. if you look over on this sidehere, along the edge on the right side, you can tellthat this stain was applied by hand as opposed to amanufactured spray process. another thing i noticedlooking at the underside
are these really nice turned legs here. the key things that actuallyconcerns me a little bit is the fact that it's not the same woodspecies that i see on the top. in fact i think, just lookingat the grain patterns, that this is probably pineor some similar soft wood. generally it makes sense thatthey would do this because to make a giant turned leg likethis and this large cross brace, to make that out of mahoganywould be prohibitively expensive, or it would just make it avery, very high end table, and
they have to pump these thingsout and make them affordable. in order to make themahogany look like pine they have to throw ona bunch of extra stain. i personally don't like that technique and i like to use the same wood throughout, but i understand the reasoningbehind it in this case. that's going to be one of ourchallenges as we go through this. when we refinish it weneed to make these legs look similar to thetop, and i really don't
want to lay on a thicklayer of stain to do that. we'll approach thatchallenge when we get to it. taking a closer look at the top of the table i see a few interesting things. first of all, more evidenceto this being a nice, solid piece of mahogany isthe profile on the edge. if this were a veneer it wouldbe very difficult for them to get a mahogany edge thisthick, this would have to be an applied piece of solidmaterial on a base of some sort of
sheet good, and there's norealistic way that they can get this smooth of a grain flow throughout,so that's another good sign. a few other things i noticed. there's a lot of flaws in the top that we're going to have to remove. and most importantly itlooks like when they attached the hardware to the bottomof the table they may have either pre-drilled andcounter-bored a little bit too deep or they just usedscrews that were too long,
because we've got a fewholes here that are clear indicators that a screw hascome up a little bit too high. we've got ways of dealingwith little issues like that, so that should be no problem. the other thing i'd like to takea look at is the center leaf. it's a little bit hardto pull these apart, and that's part of whati'm fixing in this process, but we'll see if we can get it there. i'll show you how this whole thing works.
maybe not. can you help me? you can leave it on. nicole: what do i do?marc: just pull both sides and wiggle. nicole: did you break it? marc: no, it's alreadybroken, i've got to fix it. okay, forget it. there we go. okay, thanks. the lovely and beautifulnicole spagnuolo, everybody.
i don't know if you can seethe details of this shot here. this is pretty cool, i'veactually never seen this before, but i don't do a whole lot ofrefinishing so that might be why. if you check it out thispart of the leaf is actually secured with some sort of adowel that's into the sides of the apron, and the wholepiece rotates on that dowel. they're hinged in the middlewith a pretty unique hinge here, and actually allowsthis piece to fold out. all along the side there'sdowels here and along the
left side leaf, so thatonce everything is down you should be able to popeverything together like that. that's pretty good forsuch an old table to be this level, that'spretty good condition. one other thing i lookfor is on the inside edges of a leaf i try to followthe wood grain down the side and see if it'sactually the same material. in this particular caseyou can see that the manufacturer really hasn'tapplied much finish,
hardly even any stain on the inside, and that actually works inour favor because now i can very clearly see that thisis mahogany straight through. it may seem like i'mputting a lot of emphasis on this top being made out of solid wood, but if you refinish afew pieces of furniture and you've dealt with a veneer top, you'll know exactly whati'm talking about and how easy is to burn rightthrough that veneer,
go into the sublayer of thesheet good that the material was made out of, and thepiece is just destroyed. the only choice is to really, if you have some clever way ofcovering it up you could do that, or you just re-veneer the top. a solid top is going to helpus avoid that altogether, and really give this customer a nice completely refinished, brand-new surface. one of the first things i like to do is
determine what type of finish is on this. is it a lacquer, is it a polyurethane, is it some industrialvinyl something or other that we're never goingto be able to get off. that's going to tell mea lot about the approach that i need to takeand how involved i need to get in actuallygetting this finish off. you could always stripit, just about anything is going to come offwith a stripper, but that
stuff's pretty nasty,it's extremely caustic and i'd rather not useit if i don't have to. the first thing i'm goingto do is wipe the surface down with a little bit of lacquer thinner. just from looking at it i don'tthink that this is lacquer. after a while you get a good idea of the appearance of different finishes, shellac, lacquer, polyurethane, and you can tell. if this were lacquer, theinteresting thing about lacquer,
it is a solvent-based finishso now matter how old this lacquer is, if i put lacquerthinner on that surface, i actually will re-melt thelacquer, re-activate it, and i should be able to wipe it off. with enough lacquer thinner icould wipe down to the bare wood, and in some cases ifit is a lacquer table, i might do that because i'drather deal with a little bit of lacquer fumes orlacquer thinner fumes than actually deal with the nastinessof a chemical stripper.
just confirming what i thought, this stuff isn't budging at all. that indicates to me, i'm pretty confident that this is a polyurethane surface. nothings coming off, i'm cleaning the table and that's about it. i will also mentionjust a quick safety tip. obviously if you're usinglacquer thinner or any kind of chemical that has astrong odor like this you
want to wear a respirator,want to protect your eyes, protect your hands, may evenwant to protect your arms, any place you have exposed skin. that was just a shortduration and it's hard for me to talk to you with a respirator on, so i'm going to forego one for now. now that i know that this isprobably a polyurethane surface, the first thing i liketo do is see how easy is it going to be tojust scrape the material
off prior to doing alittle bit of sanding. again, i'd rather use thatmethod than use a chemical. i have a few different tools here, two different types of scrapers. a standard card scraper that'sbeen sharpened so that it has a little microscopic metalburr, that is a metal hook that effectively will slicethe grain as i go through, in this case just slicing off the finish. and this is a number 80 cabinetscraper made by stanley,
it's a pretty classic tool butessentially does the same thing. this can be a little bit more aggressive, at least the way thati've got mine tuned up. we'll use these and see how easy this finish is going to be to scrape off. (scratching) i can see i'm pullingoff most of the finish. i know i definitely wantto scrape most of this top down before i hitit with some sandpaper.
there's just no reason towaste all that sandpaper and put all the polyurethanedust in the air. i'll probably go throughand scrape the entire top. i may switch to somethinglike my cabinet scraper, which again as you can seehere is extremely aggressive, with one stroke i was ableto get down to bare wood. if i use this guy i'm probablygoing to have to go over it afterwards with a little bitmore of a gentle scraper, and then go over the wholething with maybe a belt sander
and a light grit, or possiblymy random orbit sander, just to smooth the surface out a bit. another note about this cabinet scraper. clearly with this levelof aggression, if we had determined that this was aveneer surface there's no way that i would even use this,this would stay on the shelf. i may scrape some of thefinish off with this, but when it's a veneer you've got a whole extra level of thingsto be concerned about,
because that would have probablyburned through my veneer and we would have had aserious problem on our hands. but again, having the solid top i can be a little bit more aggressive. one other major concerni want to mention when you're refinishing anantique like this is lead. you need to be concerned aboutwhat that finish has in it, if it's a paint, if it's a clearfinish, possibly the stain, any of those could containsome lead components if the
finish is old enough and itjust happens to have lead in it. i'm not sure the exactyear, i believe it was in the late '70s is when theydecided to actually ban these products from havinglead in them, so it's a realistic possibility thatsomething that's not even really a true antique couldstill have lead in it. make sure you know the history of the piece that you're working with. this particular piece,i spoke to the owner,
i kind of have an idea of its history, and you can see based onits condition how old it is. i don't have any fear that thereis any lead material in this, but just to be safe iprobably will use one of these little lead test kits todouble check and make sure that there is no lead in there,you just can't be too safe. these little kits are availableat the big box stores, home depot, lowes, anythingyou've got around you, even a regular hardware store.
i imagine they're not perfectbut certainly when you can sand the surface a little bitand create a bunch of dust and use that as your testing agent,you'll probably get a pretty accurate reading as to whetherthere's lead or not lead. the bottom line is if there'ssome lead, just let it go, you're better off notworking on the piece at all unless you absolutelyknow what you're doing and you've got experienceworking with lead. you have to wear a specialrespirator, you have to make
sure any of the dust thatyou make is taken care of, and if you vacuum it upconsider the fact that that dust material isgoing to go right into that vacuum filter andit's just going to be recirculated every timeyou turn your vacuum on. it's really not worth the risk. a lot of times just learnto live with the antique, rustic beauty of thepiece rather than try to refinish it if you knowthat lead my be an issue.
i decided to do the leadtest on camera for you so you can get an idea of what to expect. if you've never done it before, the results are prettyclear cut but you're never 100 percent sure, is thatpink, is that orange. you'll see what colorwe come up with here. the first thing i'mgoing to do, especially in this area that i've already pulled some material up, i'm goingto start standing it.
i've got just a 220 grit sandpaper here. don't have to be realaggressive, just make a little bit of dust and get downinto that finish layer. according to the instructions you have an area in the front to crush. there's actually a glass vialin there but the cardboard is thick enough that it'snot going to hurt you. crush the back, shake it upso you mix the two chemicals. whatever reaction has totake place, takes place.
and you squeeze it just until you see some of that liquid come out at the tip. when it does go down into that dust that you've made and swirl it around. give it a few minutes. a few seconds, maybe a minute. according to the instructionsif there's lead present it's going to turn pink, andthe color that i see here is definitely not pink, it's orange,it's pretty much the color
of the chemical when it cameout of the stick to begin with. at this point i would bereally confident to go into this just wearingmy standard safety gear and protect myself inthe standard methods, as opposed to going through all kinds of hoops trying to protect myself from lead. the first order of business is to carefully disassemble the table. i start by removing thebase from the apron,
which involves removing a small screws. then i detach the twotable top halves from the support braces, whichthankfully were not glued down. it's never a good idea to glue anything to a solid wood table top ina cross-grain orientation. screws and oversizedholes on the other hand, allow the top to expandand contract while also allowing us to easilydetach the table top. i decided to try scrapingthe finish of of one of the
top pieces just to showyou how much fun it can be. my tool of choice for this isa number 80 cabinet scraper. you could also use a standard card scraper or even a belt sander. with a little bit of patience,a whole lot of elbow grease, and a tiny pinch of magic thefinish will be off in no time. no time at all. sometimes you've got to get creative. come on buddy you can do it, come on.
come on, you're therachael ray of woodworking. get it done, go man, go! i certainly do admire anybody who would scrap that entire table top by hand. fortunately i've got somehigh-tech tools that will save me a lot of time andcertainly save my back. we're just going to use the drum sander to buzz this entire top down, get it down to bare wood with maybe two or three passes.
all the waste goes rightinto the dust collection bin and it's really goingto save us a bunch of time. let's head on over there. the drum sander is anawesome tool that basically consists of a rotating drumwrapped in sandpaper and a conveyer belt that passesa piece of wood underneath. it makes quick tasks oftedious sanding tasks. not everyone will have one of these, and if you don't you might wantto find a friend that does.
you can see after justa few jobs like this, a drum sander pays for itself. check that out. super smooth. i was just getting myself alittle bit of sandpaper and i saw something that youguys might be interested in. this may be old news fora lot of you but this is just a little sandpapertearoff jig that i made. i use this sanding block a lot and it just requires a certain length.
actually it's evenly divisibleso there's really no waste, but if you get just some scrap plywood, a nice new hacksaw blade andyou screw the blade to the end, then you get a piece ofplywood as a stopper for the exact spacing that you needfor that piece of sandpaper. just push it up againstthe edge like this. tear down just like it's cellophane or aluminium foil in the kitchen. when it's all said and doneyou've got these perfectly-sized
strips of sandpaper ready togo for whatever system you use. one really cool trick that you have to be a little bit careful with is if you have a complex profile like we have here, it's a roundover and alittle bit of a cove. i'm sure they used asingle bit to create this, and i don't happen tohave this bit on hand but i do want to clean up mostof this extra material here. since this is end grainthis is going to be
really stubborn and prettydifficult to get the extra stain and the polyout of those deep corners. one quick way to do it,and again i have to stress you should be very careful,especially if you're working on an antique andsomething with history, you don't want to destroy thispiece and you really don't want to change anything, youjust want to lightly touch it. the idea here is to takeany router bit that you have in your collection thatmight just graze the surface.
you don't have to do theentire thing in one shot, but maybe for instance, inthis case i've got a roundover bit here, and the roundoverhas a bearing on it. that bearing is going toride against the surface, and as it goes it's going tore-establish this curve here. in fact, it's really not going to change it much at all, it'sjust going to take off enough material so thatit cleans it up for me. it makes it a lost easier and alot less sanding for me to do.
let's give it a shot andsee how it turns out. (mechanical grinding) you can see there's anice clean edge here. all i have to do is giveit a light sanding and that doesn't really needto be touched any more. where we do have alittle bit more material to remove is in this corner here, right as it wants to slope upinto this next section. difficulty here is the factthat i don't have a bit
that's going to allow meto do that in one shot. it would be nice if i did, but i don't. i'm going to draw myscraper here across the edge and very carefully, veryslowly go back and forth. that's going to help meclean that up as well. if you have any areas herein the front that need to be removed, thescraper is great for that. if you don't have a router bitthat fits the profile, this is the way you're probablygoing to have to go about it.
use a scraper to removethe excess material until you can go downto a piece of sandpaper. i'm going to follow thisup using another bit. probably this little cove bit,also known at a corebox bit. if i use that in conjunctionwith this little router fence i can actually get it ina nice straight line using the edge of the tableas my guide, come across here and that's going toclean up this inner edge. really, the only thingi'm going to have to clean
up manually should bethis outside corner here, and that's really nottoo bad, considering. you can see along this curvededge i run into a problem using my corebox bit to removematerial on this upper edge. as i'm running the routeralong this edge i can only get so far beforeit becomes ineffective and i can't actually removethe material anymore. as i was sanding a few of the other boards i started to realize how much this stinks,
and i need to rely on somefreehand skills and actually clean up this curvefreehand with a corebox bit. wish me luck, hold your breath, this is not for the faint of heart. see how it goes. that is much better. got a little bit more here that i'll get, but you get the idea. if you're confidentenough with your freehand skills you can get awaywith something like that.
if you're not confident i recommend practicing some inlays for a while. if you do freehand inlay a lot, something like this reallyisn't too difficult. that's one solution on howto get that curve cleaned up. something i wanted to showyou guys is some of the difficulty i ran into whilepulling apart the base. whenever you're attacking something like this you've got to lookfor numerous things.
not only the original joinery,trying to figure out how it was actually put together,but to also look at some of the homeowner intervention,and see, at some point if this was loose somebodyprobably just drove a screw through or added alittle bit of extra glue, hoping that would tighten everything up. that is in fact what i found. not only was there extraglue around the joint, but i found a few screws that were driven
up at an angle to give it more support. i pulled all of those out,and now i'm back to the original joinery that wasdone when it was made. i have a little screw cap down here, and there was a standardscrew inside that hole. inside this larger capi actually thought that this was an interesting dowel or something that went all the way through the piece. turns out it actually is just avery meaty hand-made screw cap.
inside of that was a lag bolt, and that's actually holdingthis support piece on. the problem that i had withthis was as i was trying to loosen the joint iactually split this piece. i want to show you this because this is something that can very easily happen, and it happens in the refinishingindustry all the time. it's just a product ofbanging parts apart, and knocking jointsapart, but one of the key
things in woodworking is notnecessarily just how good of a woodworker are, it's howwell you hide your mistakes. i've already spent about 20minutes sanding this leg, and i've got two of theseto do so i need to come up with something that'sa little bit faster than just sitting there by handand trying to clean it up, that's going to take a long time. that certainly is possible,and a lot of you are probably going to have to dosomething like that someday,
and there's really not awhole lot you can do if you don't have certain tools,that's just the way it is. in this case, since it is a turned leg, there's still marks on here. i actually could chuckthis up on my lathe, and i don't have a really big lathe, it's just an inexpensive jet mini lathe, but in a case like thisit's more than adequate. i could just chuck it backup into the lathe and very
gently re-turn it, kind oflike i did with the router bit, just kiss the surfaceto remove that material. if you don't do thatyou could still get the job done but it probablywon't be as clean, especially where youhave areas of end grain. it's really hard to getthat stain out of there. that end grain just pulls thestain, pulls the finish in, and it's really, really penetrated deep, so it's very difficultto sand all that away.
we're actually going to goahead and take a little bit of time to try and sort of re-turnthis, but be very gentle, i don't want to change any dimensions, and i certainly don'twant to do any damage. i want to make this lookbetter than it looked before. that's essentially what we're going to do. i'm going to jump in here andprobably we're going to use an array of tools, startingwith my super flute bowl gouge. turning tools, there's aton of them, but i actually
only use three or four todo all the work that i do. i'm not really a huge turner,i enjoy it once in a while, it's a nice break from the norm. my wife likes to turn alot, so maybe she'll do an episode for you later,but we're not going to get into the details of theactual turning at this time, we're going to save thatfor a turning episode. i didn't even think i wasgoing to have to do this but this leg is takingme a little bit too long,
so we're looking to savetime- (crashing) where we can i'm going to officiallyannounce that if my wife doesn't clean up this garagesale crap from this area, let's say by the weekend, i think i'm officially going to freak out, so be looking for that on my blog. thanks. (bluesy rock music) now after about five minutesof turning and five minutes of sanding we've got a piecethat's ready for the next step.
maybe a little bit of cleaning up to do here and there but it looks pretty good. i've got another time-saving and finger-saving tip here for you. i don't know if i've shown these before but these are littleprofile sanding moulds. they're made out of rubberand they only cost a few bucks for a pack, and there's maybefour of five different sizes, and you have both concave andconvex curve shaped units here.
you just wrap them insandpaper and you can conform to any profile youhappen to need to sand. you've also got these skinny,pointy ends here which are great for getting into thesereally tight curves like this. i'll be using these to getthrough the rest of this project. all of the pieces that are left have a nice little spot thatthese are perfect for. for just a few bucks it's a really good investment to save your fingers.
after a full day of usingsandpaper like this you'd be amazed at how sore yourfingers are going to get. spend the money, it's worth it. now that i've done the bulk of the polyurethane and stainremoval it's time to do a final sanding,probably up to 180 grit. before i even do that i'm looking around and my shop is quite a mess. i'm sure you guys haveconfronted this numerous times.
you get to this point in a project and everything is all over the place. a wise man once told methat if every time you come into your shop youtake just 10 things, pick any 10 things and putthem away, you'll notice a huge difference in thecleanliness of your shop. then also of course that makes the shop a little bit safer to work in. first let me pan around, my wife's not
here to move the camera so bare with me. if it bothers you tune in to another channel. it's pretty messy. i'm going to put 10 things away and we'll see if this actually works. wow, who would have thought, putting stuff away actually makes it cleaner. awesome. i'm at the point now thateverything has been rough sanded.
most of the material, the polyurethane and the stain has been removed. you can see it's in prettygood shape at this point. what i need to do now is dothe final finish sanding, the last step prior to adding a finish, a stain, whatever theplan is for this piece. for most of these odd-shaped parts i'm probably going to do it by hand. i'm going to go from wherei'm at now to a 180 grit,
and probably just usesome hand sanding tools, like this block sander here. for the larger surfaces likethe table top, we've got four or five different table toppieces, they're all nice and flat. a tool for that, the bestsuited tool for that is something like a randomorbit sander, this guy here. this differs from your standardquarter sheet sander and a belt sander, some of the moretraditional sanders, in the fact that it actually sands ina random orbit, hence the name.
what that means to thewoodworker is since it's going in not only a circle but it'sshaking and vibrating within that, so it's creating a random scratch pattern. the interesting thing aboutthe eye, the human eye will only see consistentstraight line patterns. if it's all little squiggly lines your eye just doesn't pick it up. you go to a nice fine grit,180 grit, your eye isn't going to actually see that if youuse a random orbit sander,
it's just little squigglylines all over the place. kind of a very cool tool. if you are getting a lot ofdust in your shop, and if you are going to use a toollike this you probably are, you want to make sure you get some sort of dust collection builtin right at the tool. it's always a good idea to wearyour dust mask or some sort of respirator, but if you cancollect the dust straight out of the tool you're going tostop it from getting in the air
in the first place, that'sdefinitely an awesome way to go. what i've done is i'veused the dust collection port that's built right into the tool. i get a little coupler here,actually i think i got this one from home depot, connects rightinto the end of my shop-vac. shop-vac's not the perfecttool for dust collection, i've probably gonethrough three of them just because i almost solelyuse it for this purpose. there's so much fine dust thati don't think a shop-vac is
really intended to pull inthat much super-fine dust, even with a high-grade hepafilter that i have on it, it still doesn't seem tolast as long as it should. the first thing i'm going to do is i'm going to hit it with a 120 grit paper. to explain my reason and mychoice for that, the drum sander was the last thing thattouched those table tops, and i believe the lastgrit i used was 120 grit. the thing to keep in mind is when you use
a heavy-duty machine to do your sanding, either a belt sander or adrum sander like we used, it says 120 grit but ittends to put in a lot deeper scratches thananother comparable tool might use, or evendoing something by hand. if you finished at 120,make sure that when you move over to a hand held sanderthat you either start at 120, you might even want to start at 100 grit, go a little bit lower andthen progress your way
through the grits up towhere you want to be. in this case i finished off at 120. i'm going to start at 120with my random orbit sander and i'm going to finishoff with a 180 pad, and that's going to giveme a really nice finish. one other note about random orbit sanders is what makes thisdifferent than a regular quarter sheet sander, aregular orbiting sander. essentially it's theaction of the pad here.
not only does it spinin a circle but it also does an orbiting, vibratingaction which really, essentially all it doesis it fools the eye. it's such a random scratch pattern that the eye doesn't even see it as a pattern. therefore to our eye it's aninvisible scratch, essentially. it's a very effective tool if you're working with large, flat areas. you could certainly use it onthe front of these legs here.
any flat surface like that,these tools are just awesome for. i use this on everysingle project that i do. i've just finished sandingthe entire project, all of the table top pieces, with a randomorbit sander to 180 grit. things are feeling nice and smooth here, it seems like we're readyto go with our top coat and our clear finish,but there is a problem. we have to keep in mind thegrain structure of this wood. in this case we're working with mahogany.
mahogany as well as walnutand oak are open-pored woods. we have to think aheadabout what that's going to look like if we put ahigh-gloss top coat on, are we putting a matte finish on it. you have to think about these things ahead of time and know what'sgoing to look right and what's going to look a little bit off. to me, nothing looks weirder or just not right to me than a high-gloss finish on an
open-pored wood, itjust doesn't look right. if you're going with a high-glossfinish that you want to look like basically a sheetof glass over your wood, you can't have little pore pocketsin it, little divots in it. you need a continuous, flat surface to get that really nice sheenthat you're going for. if you're going to hit it witha matte finish material, or you're going to knock down thegloss to something like a matte finish, the pores may not makethat much of a difference.
you may want that naturallook if you're going to hit it with a danishoil or pure tung oil or something like that,you may not mind those. you want a very close-to-the-wood finish, you're not building ahuge finish up on top of the wood so it doesn'treally matter so much. right now we're going to talk alittle bit about pore filling. there are a number of methods out there for filling pores in a piece of wood.
ask 100 woodworkers and youmight get 100 different answers, but for me i have two methods that i use depending on whattype of top coat that i'm going to be usingon that finished piece. these two methods work greatfor me so i stick with them. the first one is a morenatural finish method. it doesn't involve anycommercially-available pore-filling products,but it's pretty cool. i'm going to show it to you.
that's not actually what i'mgoing to use on this refinishing job, but it is one that ido use pretty frequently, so i think it's worthwhileto go through that process. then i'll show you theone that i'm actually going to use for thisproject specifically. instead of this piece ofmahogany we're going to work with this nice piece ofquarter sawn white oak. look really close andthere's a lot of really wide open pores here that arejust begging to be filled,
so let's give them their wish. there are four things thatwe need to get started on this oil varnishpore-filling adventure. oh nurse! number one, sandpaper. really any sandpaper will do, but my preference is automotive sandpaper. it's a wet-dry material soyou can actually get this submerged in oil and itwon't start to fall apart,
the grit's going to stay intact, it's going to do a real good job. you could start with320, you could use a 220, even 180, anything that's going to create sawdust mixed with our varnish and oil. next we need varnish. any polyurethane varnishwill do, you just want something that's going tosolidify in those pores, stretch itself out and give youa nice clean, smooth surface.
gloves. any gloves will work. oil. okay, that's great ifwe're making a salad. oil. there you go, tung oil. you could also used boiled linseed oil. these oils don't dry real fast, it's going to mix with our varnish and give us a nice long working timing towork with our slurry.
another thing that youcan use to save time so you don't have to mix ityourself is danish oil. danish oil is actually apre-mixed oil varnish mixture. it's basically everythingthere in one step. we pour it on the surface, startsanding away, we're good to go. i start the process by usinga paper towel to spread a liberal amount ofdanish oil on the surface. i'm using a dark-coloreddanish oil in this example so that the effect of the porefilling is much more obvious.
next i use a sanding block with 320 grit wet-dry sandpaper tosand the entire surface. our goal here is to createa slurry of oil and sawdust that will essentiallyserve as our pore filler. i use 320 grit here but you could just as easily use anything from 150 to 320 grit. after a few minutes of sanding the pores are pretty much filled. i could look at it witha light coming across the
surface this way, that'sreferred to as a raking light, and i can see that the pours almost are invisible at this point,in terms of depth, it looks pretty much flat,so that's a good start. although the pores are filledthey're not solidified yet, the oil varnish mixture hasn't cured, so if we rub across the grain at this point and remove this excess material, in all likelihood we'regoing to pull stuff
out of the pores, wedon't want to do that. i'm going to let this sit for 24 hours. when i come back to ittomorrow, going to put a little more oil on thesurface, get some more sandpaper and go throughthat process one more time. any of the pores that had been filled from the first sanding are definitely going to get filled during the second sanding. i'm going to let thatsit for a few minutes,
then i'm going to wipeoff the excess either using burlap, that'sthe best thing to use. i personally don't have burlap in my shop but i do have paper towels. i'm probably going to scrapethe excess off the surface, using some sort of aplastic scraper like this, and then let it dry for anotherfew minutes, and come back with a paper towel andlightly rub across the grain. i always go across the grain because if
you go with the grain you're going to have a tendency to pull outthat pore-filling material. at least 24 hours after yourlast wet sanding is what i would recommend beforeyou actually dry sand this in preparation foryour stain or finish. the second pore-filling methodthat i like to use involves the use of a commercially-availablepore-filling material. something like thisoil-based paste wood filler is perfect for this type of application.
this particular one is natural,there's no tint or color. in fact it's a very dull,un-wood-like grey color. the point is that you could tint this to whatever color you want it to be. if you're doing walnut you can go brown, if you're doing mahoganyyou can go a little bit red. we're actually going touse a few different dyes here to make our owncustom-colored pore filler. then we're going to spread it on the
surface and go through the whole process. i keep a lot of these littleplastic cups in the shop. they're disposable,they're great for epoxy, any types of glue you want to mix up, any pigments or dyes you want to mix up ahead a time before youadd them to a finish. in this case it's goingto be where we're going to mix our pore filler andour actual dye material. i highly recommendgetting yourself a set of
these little measuringspoons, they work great. if you can use theseyou get to a point that you start almost makingrecipes for things, and you get repeatable quantities, tablespoons, teaspoons, what have you. these are usually availablein your kitchen, and if your wife starts asking questionsyou just do what i do and ... "i don't know what you're talking about." go ahead and take a few scoops of this.
i'm only going to make enoughfor the one panel here, i'm going to do the restof the panels later. put that on the side. i have a dark mission browntranstint dye and a reddish-brown. i'm probably going to add, saya two-to-one mixture of this. for every drop of darkmission brown i'm going to do two drops of the reddish-brown. let me go with two drops of dark mission. four drops of the reddish-brown.
give that a little bit of a mixy mix. now we have a much more pleasant brown color, a little bit of a hint of red. by the time this dries itgets a little chalky looking, but once you put a finish over top of it again it will bring out that color. we do want to get to a color that's going to blend nicely with this surface. it's a real good idea to workon a small section at a time.
this particular leaf isjust about the right side. if you were doing a large piecei probably would recommend doing a section aboutthis size, going through the whole process andthen moving down the line. the idea is basicallydrip some on the surface. now you use this little plastic spreader. i try and get anything i can for free when i can get it for free. this particular spreader came with the
lettering on my truck for my business. the sign company gives these outwhenever you buy the letters. i figure what the heck, it's perfect. another thing you can use, a very popular thing to use is actually old credit cards, if you don't mind keeping one around. in fact the best thing todo is use the fake ones you get in the mail, anduse those to spread glue, spread finishes, whatever you need.
my final strokes here are going to be across the grain like so. if you go with the grainyou have a tendency to actually pull the materialback out of the pores. give it about three minutes, the range is three to five minutes. when you live in arizona, theygive you a range, always take the lower end of the range,everything dries faster here. what i'm going to start doingis going across the grain
pulling off this extra pore filler here. it's not a bad idea to get your cup over there and take some of that extra stuff because you could reuseit for the next panel. this not only removes the excess but it does a real good job of packing the pore fillerdown into the pores. at this point in the gameyou could leave it as is, let it sit 24 hours andbe ready to go tomorrow.
the problem with thatis that we still have a good amount of residue on the surface. the scraper got most of itoff but anything that's left on here we're going to haveto sand through tomorrow. the idea is not to coverthe entire surface, it's just to get material in the pores. when we sand tomorrow wewant to sand down to bare wood on the areas thatare adjacent to the pores. after letting the porefiller dry overnight
i begin by sanding thesurface with 120 grit paper. notice how chalky anddusty the pore filler is. the dust is a lot likethe dust from drywall mud. this is not something you want to breathe so be sure to take the proper precautions such as dust collection and a respirator. after removing the bulk ofthe pore filler i switch to 180 grit and then sanduntil i reach bare wood. now that the surface issanded nice and smooth,
we've got most of that filler off there, just blow off the extra dust. this guy is ready for our finish. now that all the pore fillingis done, all the sanding is done, these piecesare ready for the finish. what i'm going to use isa pre-catalyzed lacquer, it's what i've got in here. i've actually added some lacquerthinner in there as well, just to dilute it and make ita little bit easier to spray.
the first thing i like to do. here's my little spray cup. i actually like to filter the finish, because there could belittle bits of sediment, pieces of the flatteningagent or even just dirt inside of the can that we reallydon't want that in our finish, so it's a good idea to strain it. what i use for this is justa standard paint strainer, finish strainer that you can get from any
paint store, hardware store, whatever. it's going to be a littlemessy, you expect that. put the cap back on, get ready to spray. now that the part thathad potential splashing is over with i'm going toput on my safety lenses. i start by spraying lengthwise with the gun about six inches from the surface. in order to get a smoothand consistent finish it's very important tokeep your arm locked
so the angle of the gun never changes. it's also important to start spraying before you actually touch the piece, and continue sprayingat the end of each pass. if you start and stop whilepositioned over the piece you'll most likely end upwith heavy and light areas. during each successive pass i try to overlap the previous pass by about half. just a quick safety note,be sure to check into the
regulations in your areaconcerning sprayed finishes, and always wear the properprotective equipment. before i reassemble the entire table there's a few things i'd like to show you. first of all, the little woodengears for the pull mechanism under the table, these thingswere shot to hell pretty much. there were six teeth missing off of this one and four off of this one. i talked with the customer and asked
them what would they rather me do. i could build new ones andactually cut new ones out, which would have been very expensivefor them, or i could just try to rebuild the teethusing whatever i have around. they decided to have me rebuild them instead of cutting new ones. it wasn't quite the right surface for me to actually rebuild it with wood. it was just too small andit would have been a mess.
i decided to actually rebuild it using a really, really hard wood filler. i use this stuff forstructural wood filling. if i'm doing something that isgoing to be for looks there's other wood fillers that aren'tnecessarily as strong but the color matching and theability to accept the stain is quite a bit better, so they'remore suited for that task. this in particular,this minwax wood filler, i like to use that whenit's a structural issue and
i really want to get somethingin there that's going to be as strong as wood and it'sgoing to last a long time. this particular materialis a two part mix. you've got a hardener and thegrey, milky filler material. you don't have to usevery much of the hardener, just about a little quarterinch dot goes to, i think they say a golf-ball-size amountof filler, so not very much. interestingly enough thishardener is just benzoyl peroxide. this is the same stuff that's in oxitan.
don't ask me how i know this,because i have perfect skin. the interesting thing aboutthis wood filler is if you look at the ingredients,and anyone who's in the automotive repairbusiness or auto body repair probably would recognizethis stuff right off the bat. it looks an awful lot like bondo. looks like bondo, smells like bondo. i did a little bit of homework and found that pretty much thisis bondo relabeled as
wood filler and costsabout three times as much. for about the same price,maybe a couple bucks more, you could go to homedepot, lowes, wherever, and you can get a can ofbondo that's about this big. who knows how long it'sgoing to take you to use it, but the bottom line is it'sa heck of a lot cheaper so find some friends, buythe big can, split it up, let everybody take some andit's definitely a better investment than thislittle can for 15 bucks.
the last thing i'd like toshow you is how i'm going to treat the moving parts of theunder table pull mechanism. as these pull apart theyrub against each other, and you're going to have friction there. it's our goal to reduce thatfriction as much as possible so when someone pulls thetable it's an effortless task. usually what i'll do is iwill coat the sides of this, any part that's goingto touch, coat that with maybe a two pound or aone pound cut of shellac.
it's a nice brittle finish,especially if you're doing a drawer slide or something onthe interior of a case or box, you don't really want anything that's going to retain any odors, and oil finishes tend to retainthose odors for a long time. something like shellac, once it's cured, doesn't smell like anything. once the shellac is dry theni'll sand it lightly with a 320 grit sandpaper and maybesome four ought steel wool,
and i'll hit it with alittle bit of paste wax. once you do that it'sgoing to be silky smooth and those pieces are goingto slide back and forth against each other, it'sgoing to be awesome. it looks like this table hasturned out really nice, i think the customer is going to bepretty happy with the result. after the finish cured iwas able to glue everything back together using astructural epoxy, in this case, in refinishing projectsi generally recommend
structural epoxy over a five minute epoxy, or even something likejust regular wood glue. when you're dealing with theseold joints sometimes there's dried finish, maybe a littlebit of dried glue, things that can actually inhibit the bondingpower of stain or wood glue. i definitely recommend going with epoxy. just a note about the color matching, i really didn't have to do a whole lot. pine and mahogany are neverreally going to go great
together, the grain patternsare just too different. but once i put a new coatof lacquer on it the actual background colors arepretty darn close and were good enough that i wasn'tgoing to mess with it. sometimes you start downthat road of changing the color and it justturns into a nightmare. i checked with the customers,they were very happy with this result and the wantedthe sort of rustic look that the base has, and they thinkthe table top looks perfect.
customers are going to bereally happy with this one. i hope you've enjoyedour refinishing episode. remember to stay subscribed and check out our website atwww.thewoodwhisperer.com. if you have any questionsor comments please feel free to e-mail us atthewoodwhisperer@gmail.com. now go build something, or maybe you could settle for just refinishing something. (warm blues music)