Finishing

One of the most difficult tasks in wood finishing is matching the color of a new part you have installed in furniture or cabinets to the existing color on the other parts. The usual way [...]

Like a movie star, oak possesses natural good looks. Unlike a movie star, however, oak is easy to work with—even during finishing. Oak’s distinctive grain pattern (see photo below) is what people [...]

This is pretty basic, but here goes anyway. When you have a situation of peeling paint, you have to remove it before applying fresh paint, or your efforts will be ineffective. Scraping usually [...]

Over my career making and restoring furniture I’ve found washcoats helpful now and then when staining wood. A washcoat is a finish, any finish, thinned with two or more parts thinner and applied [...]

Am I the only person who thinks the EPA’s proposed ban on methylene chloride in paint strippers is a big and unnecessary overstep by government? Ever since the EPA announced on May 10, 2018, that [...]

You may be aware that I have a connection with Denmark. My wife is Danish, and we lived there for two years in the mid-1970s. So I guess that makes me the go-to expert on all furniture Danish. [...]

Those who follow this blog know that I’m pretty taken with the advances being made in paints and coatings. We might not be seeing these advances in the paint we buy at the home center yet, but [...]

I get a lot of questions about finish problems, and, as you can imagine, they are often difficult to diagnose simply from the description. In these situations, a picture can really be worth a [...]

After my last post (April 10) about wearing gloves when spraying with a spray gun, I thought it might be appropriate to discuss aerosols as a substitute for spray guns. There are two types of [...]

I’ll probably get pushback on this, but here goes anyway. I’d love to hear your objections. Look at the above picture. What seems odd to you? It’s not something small. It’s jumping right off the [...]

A friend called with a finish question. He had just made a guitar in a guitar-making class and wanted to know the best finish for it. He began with the statement that he didn’t have a spray [...]

I got a question from a professional woodworker wanting to know if he could market the shellac he used as “all natural,” or if Zinsser put non-natural ingredients in their shellac that [...]