99% of Beginners Don't Know These 5 Wood Finishing Secrets!

I'm going to show you five tips to instantly improve your wood finish on your project specifically on Pine projects like most of us use starting out there's certain things you need to do to make sure you get that Flawless finish I recently built this table it's all out of pine from Home Depot most of all my projects that I made on the channel have been out of pine I built hundreds of these projects over the years from stove covers to tables and I've learned some valuable lessons on what not to do and today I'm going to share with you those five tips let's go before I show you how to finish this table if you want to build one just like it I have plans available for this and many other things on our website go to 731mobileworks.com store and check those out if you use the code finish I'll give you 20 off any order including these little table plans and if you're interested any of the supplies or tools you see used today I'll put links in the description and the pin comment so you can go check them out for yourself number one you absolutely have to make sure all of the wood glue is properly cleaned up we're going to show you how to do that but I'm going to leave some of mine on there to show you what happens if you don't so during assembly of the table you may see glue squeeze out or something like that you can see it here but on sometimes depending on the color of the glue and the species of wood you may not see that squeeze out but anytime you use wood glue and there's a joint then you need to make sure that that's properly cleaned up it's easier to clean up during assembly just take a damp cloth and wipe that off and that will pretty much get rid of all the glue and then also when you're sanding you're going to make sure that you get those spots another caution is sometimes you get wood glue on your finger and you hold the piece of wood and whenever you go to stain or put your finish on that's when you see it a lot of times you don't see it before them and that's when your heart just sinks just for demonstrations I did put a little wood glue on my thumb and touch the side of the table top just to show you what it's going to look like after we finish this you're going to see how that changes things when you put your finish on tip number two if you want to make this look very professional like you absolutely knew what you were doing is fill the knot holes and the voids in the wood before you sand it this is really easy and it's specifically made easy because of company like starbine they have CA glues which are basically colored glues that dry extremely fast I've used them on a ton of products before or even made a couple of specific videos on how to use them but I'm going to show you really quick how easy it is and why you should do it when picking out the color that you're going to feel these knot holes you need to know what color you're going to be staining with now I know that I'm going to be staining with dark walnut for the top but if you're picking a lighter color you may want to go with a lighter colored CA glue or if you're just going to be painting this it really doesn't matter if it's clear or black or anything like that the darker the color the darker the wood glue it'll make it blend and look more natural this stuff is very affordable and very easy to use we got a knot hole there you can feel the crevice in there or the void and all we're going to do is squeeze that into that void I like the medium thick for these purposes it's not too thin not too thick just Goldilocks just right it's going to put a little dab on there and you'll also get some activator and you'll spray that activator on on there and that's just going to make that dry within about 30 seconds we have several of these knot holes up here that we're just going to do the same thing this one actually goes all the way around it so we'll just apply the sea glue around the knot now one of the main reasons you want to do that is to prevent that knot from working its way out later I have seen that happen you finish the project and that knot hole is actually loose and you don't know it and then it pops out you don't want that happening on your customer or on your project so go ahead and this is going to seal those in a little bit of this stuff goes a very long way I'll drop a link in the description below to my favorites another good reason to fill knot holes is to prevent that from splitting as it ages you can see that one has split in three different directions this will just bind all that together and keep it from splitting out later number three on the list is is sanding nobody likes sanding for the most part but it's an essential step to get that perfect Flawless finish we put that CA glue on there we're going to make sure that's nice and smooth for the most part on sanding when you sand things don't put too much pressure down on your sander because that will create those swirl marks that we all hate and just make sure that you get all your saw marks and things like that off of there if you don't you'll see them especially if you're staining you'll see those saw marks left in the edges of your wood on the edges of your wood if you hit that with a regular sander it's going to deform that especially if you've used round overs so I highly recommend using like a contour pad this is the one I use and it just basically forms around the edge of that profile so it doesn't damage it it just Sands it smooth what I like to do after I get through sanding with my orbital sander is I'll take something like this sanding Mouse and go with the grain just to give it a final sand at 220. I always sand with the orbital sander at 120 I rarely go above 120 on furniture pieces but on the sanding block I'll put a piece of 220 Grit on there and just sand with the grain on all the surfaces that just helps remove any of those sanding marks that may have been there if you use like a 80 grit 60 grit something like that that's going to put a lot of deep scratches especially in soft Woods like Pine that's why I highly recommend staying at 120 grit or above another thing you want to be sure and look for are clamping marks in other words where you've clamped the boards down you may see or your f-clamps have indented the wood a little bit or any type of clamp you're using really you'll see that Circle or those half circles you want to make sure that you get those sanded off because if you don't they'll absolutely show up in the stain which I'll show you in a little bit after you get through sanding you absolutely want to make sure just take your shop back or whatever and vacuum up any of the bigger loose dust you can get and then I highly recommend a microfiber cloth like these are very inexpensive and they remove a lot of the dust that you can't see and you will not remove if you just move your hand or a vacuum across the surface you can see here how much dust came up just from the top we'll wipe the whole surface down but before we move on to step number four if you skip this part and if you don't remove the dust especially from the top when you put your finish on that dust will get embedded into there and it'll be very difficult to get off later in other words when people touch the top of your product or your surface of your table they'll feel that bumpy gritty feeling you don't want that step number four before you stain it you want to wipe everything down with mineral spirits this is also going to remove some of that dust from the previous step but it's also going to reveal some things to you A lot of times if you wipe this down you'll see where you've got sanding marks those swirl marks and where you've left the glue like you see here this is 4B this is still part of the staining process and essential on soft Woods in my opinion I've stained dozens of projects without this stuff and hundreds of projects with this pre-stained conditioner from Minwax and this stuff works some people say this mineral spirits and this are the same thing but I just disagree what this will do is remove the blotchiness or the Miss colorations in Wood a lot of times when you stain Pine and you'll see some really nasty looking dark spots and things like that this helps prevent that it's a good idea here to put some gloves on this this is very simple to apply you're just going to take a terry cloth and dampen it and wipe the entire project down and this will take about 30 or 45 minutes to dry after you wipe it on and then we'll move on to four C staining and 4C I think it's where we're at we're just going to put stain on there's no magic secret to putting stain on I do recommend the best applicator for stain in my opinion are old t-shirts like old white t-shirts like undershirts because they don't have any lint things like that a terry cloth also works well which I'm using here another thing to be cautious with on Terry glosses sometimes they will kind of snag in any Splinter that may be there when applying stain to the underside where you have pocket holes like in this project the good old-fashioned Q-tip AKA cotton swab if you don't use Q-tip brand you'll just dip it into the stain and then run it into the pocket hole this is by far the easiest way to stain inside pocket holes and I recommend putting stain in there one is it helps seal it but most importantly it makes it look better to your customer if they ever look underneath the piece of furniture that way it's just not an unstained piece there as far as applying the stain go I always like to put it on the underside first and then the top side and then you'll want to let your stain dry about 24 hours before we move to the next step wipe it on fairly liberally you don't want it pulling up I think a lot of people make a mistake by putting too much stain on and that's really not the purpose of stain it's just to stain the wood it's not really to flood the wood it's not like an oil finish where you're dipping a cutting board or something like that into mineral oil and it's soaking into the grain for a period of time that's not what stain is for stain is just to color the wood to the color you want it's basically painting it but not and you may notice some dark splotches here and that's what you'll see when you don't use pre-stain once I get it coated I'll take a clean part of the rag and just wipe lightly any excess and then we'll move on to the edges before we flip it over I like these little creek blocks because they have these little rubber nibs on there and that prevents this from sliding around while I'm trying to stain something like this anytime you have a crack or a gap you want to put a little extra in there let that finish soak into that just so that it all colors it up right now this is extremely important extremely important listen do not throw this in a trash can or in the corner of your shop or anything like this these can actually self-combust in the right condition so make sure to dispose of these properly what I like to do is take an old stain rag I set it away from the house Outdoors for a couple of days and then I discard it in the outdoor trash can I do not put these in the trash can in my house or in the shop or just leave them laying around never do that with stained or oily racks now we just applied the stain to the top and we have a problem remember I talked about sanding marks as well as glue marks this is where you will see those I beared down on the sander on purpose to show you what will happen if you push down too much pressure and you don't sand that off with that sanding block you can see those little swirlies that's from the sander as well as on the same Edge I did the same thing and you can see those swirlies there and while that's it's not a huge deal it will hurt your feelings especially if it's on a large project and you have a bunch of them if you remember where I put my thumb in the glue and to accidentally touch the top then you're going to see that come out in a lighter spot in your stain if you see this on any of your project where there's a light spot that's wood glue and that's what the wood glue has already filled the pores of that wood and the stain couldn't soak in there so you're going to see that lighter spot and that's going to really hurt your feelings now you can fix that but you have to sand off the stain off of that edge or wherever that glue spot is if it's on the top you have to sand that back off if it's on the top pretty much you have to sand a large area because you want everything to mix and blend back together so in this case this tabletop here if I had a glue spot on top I would sand the whole thing back off and repeat the whole staining process for the edge you can just sand this Edge then stain it again when staining or painting the base always turn it upside down and paint indoor stain the bottom side then we flip it over and do the top side as much it's easier that way now I've applied this lighter color stain to the base and I can already see the flaws because the stain will highlight anything you've done wrong there is a clamp Mark there is a clamp Mark you can also see the swirlies right there and then if you'll take notice of the back side of these I did not apply pre-stain conditioner they're much darker and more blotchy than the front side and now you can really see those saw marks that I was pointing out earlier they're difficult to see before the stain was applied but now that the stain is applied you can clearly see them in a couple of places that the glue wasn't cleaned up on purpose again you can see right there that very light spot also you might can see it right there along that crease or along that seam but it really is pronounced here now you just the the color isn't taking to the wood the same as the surrounding areas because that glue is blocking it that's why it's so important that's one of the main things that you have to do and have to look for when building stuff like this is just to clean up those edges again a damp cloth after you put everything together just wipe it in that crease it'll take care of of it you don't have to worry about it after that but if you don't clean it up or if you get some on your thumb and touch the project then it's going to show up another thing you may notice are these horizontal lines that run down boards like this that's the face of the board even on these raw tuba sixes that's what I use to build that you can see those vertical or those lines on this one not sure how much it's showing up on camera but you can see those there that's where it was playing at the factory and if you don't sand it then it'll show up in your finish typically what I like to do is just spray the bottom first and that's going to include the inside of all those legs and everything that I can get from this angle and then after that dries it only takes lacquer probably five or ten minutes to dry before you can touch it and then I'll flip it over and do the top side and we're going to put about three coats of lacquer on there the reason I like lacquer is because each coat bonds to the coat that you previously put on there and it creates a very hard and durable surface I used lacquer on my desk build that I did a while back and it is held up extremely well even using a mouse on there without out of mouse pad so that has wore very well for a long time I used to use polyurethane specifically water-based polyurethane over oil-based stains yes you can do that and it doesn't hurt anything so long as the stain cures about 24 hours however it takes longer for it to cure between coats and it's a little harder to get a Flawless finish like you can with lacquer lacquer is my favorite go-to finish of any finish that you can use on furniture especially table tops and things like that because it's so durable and for a beginner it's very easy to apply all you have to do is spray it on now I like using these rattle cans for small projects but I have used an HVLP gun with a little bit of lacquer mixed with lacquer thinner I've got a video on that on my desk build I'll link in the description as well as a link to the polyurethane video if you like using that so I like to put two coats of lacquer on and I'm waiting about 30 minutes between each coat and then before I put the final coat on I'm going to take 320 grit sandpaper very lightly sand the top of this and just remove any bumps or anything that you may feel in that and then we're going to wipe that down with a microfiber cloth then we're going to spray our final coat of lacquer this stuff is so easy to apply anybody can do it what you never want to do is spray lacquer in an enclosed environment such as a garage which is why you see me outside fumes will come off of this thing and it makes it very difficult to breathe and it's quite dangerous actually so don't breathe this stuff in without a respirator if you're going to spray it inside I prefer to bring everything outside to spray a couple of quick tips on lacquer is you don't want to spray too heavy in other words don't make it pull up or drip all you're doing is putting a very light coat I used to hold the can about six or eight inches away and then just make equal passes or even passes on there super easy to do and it'll come out nice and Flawless just don't stop and cause a puddle also I'm using satin here you can get Gloss but I prefer the satin it just looks more natural after the final coat I let that dry for about 30 minutes before I bring it back inside at that point as long as the temperature is above 50 degrees it should be dry and you'll be able to tell if it's tacky or damp feeling or even sticky feeling if it's not then it's dry and ready to come in now wait about 24 hours before you set anything on top of that like a cup or a lamp or a plant or whatever you've built this table for overall the table looks fairly nice even with the on-purpose mistakes that I put into this to show you what not to do however if you take the time and do it properly it'll look that much better which will come in to higher price and make your projects look more professional if you like this video there's another tips and tricks video right there you got to go check out it's going to help you out click of the Box get to the big old virtual fist bump also another one of my favorite videos right there

Channel: 731 Woodworks

Views: 254,544

Keywords: 731 woodworks, how to finish wood, how to stain pine, how to apply clear finish to wood, how to apply laquer, how to stain wood without dark spots, what are tiny circles in my wood, wood finish for beginners, woodworking tips, woodworking tricks, how to apply stain, how to sand wood, how to fill knot holes in wood, best finish for wood, easiest finish for wood, easy wood finish, easy wood clear coat, easy wood stain

Id: srBrsGc-AFQ

Length: 15min 24sec (924 seconds)

Published: Sun Jan 22 2023