Finishing

This is another installment in my series on smart coatings. You can access the others by typing in “smart” in the search box near the top of my main blog page. For this installment, I’m reporting [...]

A professional woodworker got in touch with this question. He had finished a sixty-foot long countertop for a brewery tasting room with catalyzed (conversion) varnish. After the finish dried for [...]

In the October, 2017 issue of Popular Woodworking, page 10, I answered a question from a reader concerning how to handle paint on an exterior door that was beginning to lift at the cross-grain [...]

I’ve enjoyed building Arts & Crafts furniture for a number of years. The look of the quarter-sawn oak after finishing has always been a strong selling point – a common approach is a [...]

You may be familiar with the problem Apple is having with their newly released Home Pods and the white rings they sometimes leave on wood surfaces. Apple explains that they come from the [...]

I’ve written this many times and said it many more. The film thickness of a finish is much more important for preventing water getting through to the wood than the type of finish. For [...]

  A woodworker friend called wanting to know where he could buy some methylated spirits. He had just read in a book that it was the best solvent to use with shellac. So I asked him if the [...]

A woodworker friend asked me what type colorants, pigment or dye, were used in Minwax stains. He had called Minwax and was told that they use only pigment, but this didn’t match with my friend’s [...]

One of the difficulties with learning to do French polishing is overcoming the exotic vocabulary that continues to be used by some: “charge the rubber,” “fad in,” “spirit off,” etc. This [...]

Stains differ in the amount of colorant they include. On this panel I applied one brand of walnut stain to the left side and another brand to the right side, then wiped off the excess. I let the [...]

A spray pattern, with all the controls on the spray gun wide open, is supposed to be an even, elongated oval shape. If the pattern is heavier on one end than the other, the likely cause is that [...]

The left dye is Transtint metalized dye. The right dye is Lockwood analine dye. Both are water-soluble. I covered the top half of the panel and put it in a west-facing window for six months. You [...]