A Woodworkers Guide to PERFECT Finishing - Step by Step and Fixing Common Problems

we just finished up that entry table for my house and it came out gorgeous you guys loved it i think it was my second most watched video out of the last ten and one of the biggest questions was how do you do your finishing i did a video gosh about a year and a half two years ago where i talked about my four favorite finishes and my opinion from that video has not changed even in the slightest lacquer is still my go-to for most furniture projects water-based poly also if lacquer it you know if it's going to be in a more high exposure area i'll use water-based poly and those are very similar so a lot of these steps you can apply to water-based poly the only difference being that you would sand between coats and of course you wouldn't thin with lacquer thinner you would thin with water but very very similar i'm going to walk you through step by step how i do it i'm going to show you all the problems that can occur with lacquer and how you fix them spoiler it's easy i can finish a whole piece of furniture in under an hour with lacquer and give it a gorgeous perfectly smooth finish my go-to is satin i think satin tows the line between you know if you do like semi-gloss or gloss it looks very plasticky which is a favorite of beginner woodworkers it but everybody quickly realizes that you really want that oil look so satin is a great alternative between really high protection without having that sort of plasticky glossy look let's come in here i want to talk about the pros and cons about lacquer and then i'll show you how we do it step by step all right pros and cons pros this is the easiest finish in the world to apply and get a professional looking finish it is absolutely gorgeous cons it doesn't brush very well i wouldn't brush lacquer you can definitely get away with that on water-based poly a little bit more but lacquer it's what's called a self-wetting finish which means the layer above re-wets and bonds to the layer below so it can highlight imperfections if you brush so you know brush strokes can just always have brush strokes on the top they're tough to get rid of those brush strokes especially because it dries so fast typically with like an oil based poly it takes six hours to fully dry uh you know your brush strokes will lay down but this that's not really the case because it dries in seconds rather than hours so i always try and spray it get these spray cans with this like split nozzle it reduces the amount of pressure that you need to press it down by like at least 80 percent than the solid caps where you have to push the whole cap down now i have a great video about hvlp this comes in a set of three guns for like i think i paid 60 bucks for it i don't remember i'll link it down below it's also linked in my hvlp video these are super cheap and so easy to use especially if you watch my hvlp instructional videos other cons because it is self-wetting it needs to be fully cured before you can touch pieces together that means if you have like a drawer that goes in a piece and you lacquer everything the inside of the drawer the runners all that stuff if the finish is not cured i would give it at least 24 hours to fully cure then it's going to try and self-wet and stick to each other and then you pull them apart and you get these big like finish rips so that would be a con other than that uh you know it's smelly so you want to wear you know like a respirator or particulate dust mask to filter out any hvlps no vocs volatile organic compounds other than that it's pretty easy so let's talk about my steps one of the other pros to this is you really don't need to sand up that high i think i usually sand to like 150 or 180 and because it is self-wetting and really it fills in any holes and then levels and then you know builds as long as you have sort of a nice smooth finish with 150 or 180 you'll be just fine so you want to sand through your grits and get your piece up to what you want it's no harm if you want to go up to 220 or 320 if you want but there's really no need so let's get this sanded really quick and i'm going to show you how i finish up my surface prep okay now i'm not going to make you watch me sand this whole thing but here's the pencil trick you want to put pencil across your piece and because you're assuming that it's flat out of your planer so you want to keep it flat so if you do pencil across your piece and move as your pencil line gets removed you know not only have you sanded your whole piece through that grit but that you have sanded evenly because you just go until your pencils go now a good way to round edges when you're sanding especially with a random orbital is you want to traverse almost the whole 90 degrees without really touching the whole face as you sand so you saw me sort of going about you know 85 degrees to 5 degrees and that gives you a really nice rounded corner you still get some lines so what i do is once i've done that all around the piece i just come through with like a piece of the same grit sandpaper and if you fold sandpaper over on itself it won't come undone and then you can just take it by hand and that sort of just finishes out and gets rid of any of those lines from the random orbital sander so this is all sanded up to 150 let's go outside and put some finish on it i'll take you through it step by step now we're going to put it on our sawhorses if you're like me you do a lot of finishing in the same place so these were the calls that we used when we were finishing the top for that entry table and it has lacquer on it remember i talked about how lacquer is self-wetting so if i have lacquer that's wet on here even though this is cured it's going to re-wet those so you want to make sure you're using fresh stickers so i'm going to flip those over and now my piece is going to be safe to finish especially because i'm going to try and keep it in the same area it may get stuck every once in a while but if it does you can just put new stickers down and you'll be just fine i think i called them calls but i meant stickers so let's talk about what we need to do now okay so i grabbed this can just to show you the tips i was talking about that are garbage these are so much harder to push down and the fatigue when you're doing a lot of spraying is pretty bad but one thing i wanted to show you about these tips is they have this red piece on it that is rotatable so right now you can see this line that goes across that means the fan is going to be vertical up and down but you can actually spin it if you have like a leg to do or something and that's going to make the fan be horizontal so in this position it is vertical and the other way horizontal okay so to get started we're going to show you rattle cans first and then we'll go to the hvlp to get started with either version of spraying you want to do the parts that are going to suck up the most finish first so that's end grain knots because knots are just where branches come out of that board so there's end grain right there and then i do my edges and the reason is because when you do your edge it's going to over spray onto the face of your piece a little bit and when you're spraying you want to be about six to eight inches away from your piece and you want to be overlapping your sprays by half so half half just like that so we're gonna do one whole coat where we get our end grain knots edges and then do our face wait for it to dry for about i don't know three or four minutes and we're gonna do about three coats you wanna do three coats in that fashion you don't need to do any sanding in between you can wait like three to five minutes this stuff dries almost before it hits the ground so you don't need to like mask off your whole shop if you're doing it inside just sort of the surrounding area so let's go ahead and get started [Music] okay as you can see there's like different parts where you can see that it looks wet and other parts where it's just absorbed it so much and the reason we do these edges first is because we're going to do the same thing when we flip it over and because end grain and edges somewhat tend to absorb so much more material we're actually going to do it double the amount of times we do faces and then it'll even out but you can see it just like sucks up that finish almost instantly one of the common problems you run into when you're spraying is you get like a puddle or a drip now this is what's great about lacquer because it's self-wetting when you do the next coat it's going to fix any like major imperfections so like with this knot i sprayed too much in fact i'm going to do a little bit more here so now i got a ton of finish on there you can see it's like a big pool but what's great about lacquer this is so easy to fix this is what you do just take your finger and wipe it off just like that and boom we're going to sand with like a really high grit before our last coat so don't worry about getting anything look at that i mean it's already dry it's gone the pool's gone it's dry on my glove no big deal so like i said we're gonna do a couple more coats flip it over we'll do the other side you want to make sure you don't leave one side with a complete set of four coats of finish without doing the other side because sometimes it can cause it to taco especially on bigger boards so we're going to get our initial three coats on here flip it over do the same thing we and we won't have done our finish coat on either side [Music] now you can see it's shinier more shiny in different spots that's totally fine that's actually kind of what we want it's just going to build differently depending on what type of grain is in that area it's going to absorb differently in each area but once that fully dries we're going to fix that before our final coat by doing a finish sanding now look here we are this is 30 seconds after i finished spraying this is pretty much dry there's a couple sticky spots but you want to make sure you want to wait until your fingers don't catch anywhere and it's okay if they do you're not going to mess this up before you flip it over and do the other side and then i'll show you before our final coat how we fix this and it's just going to come out where you see that shininess it'll it'll just be perfectly smooth and satin throughout all right while we're waiting for that to dry let's prep our hvlp gun one thing to note is when you're ready to flip your piece and it's dry it's gonna feel rough and that's okay because our last coat is gonna fix that up no problem uh you want to shake your can you know this is another argument for getting the hvlp set up is these cans were 15.99 a piece at i think woodcraft and the spray cans which are maybe a quarter of the material are you know a little bit more than half the price when i'm spraying through an hvlp gun i find i get the best results if i do 15 to 25 percent lacquer thinner to finish the reason being the more lacquer thinner that's in there the less material you have the more it's gonna it's gonna dry quickly and spread out evenly uh but if you go too much you risk you know sort of stripping the finish below it so i find 15 to 25 is a really good ratio but again lacquer is so easy that it doesn't really matter also another pro tip when you're using these square cans turn them around and pour them the opposite way you would think and this allows air to get in and you don't get a glug it just pours cleanly rather than that if you do it this way you get that like glug glug like that and then you're going to just pour your can just like that and then you want to just get a piece of scrap wood give it a stir now when you pour it in your gun you're going to want to use a filter i'm out of cone filter so i'm just going to use a mesh spray hood i've used paper towels before you really just want to make sure there's no like thick pieces in there that are going to clog your spray nozzle all right we'll do a little hvlp review here same thing on the spray can this is going to give you a vertical fan like this is going to give you a horizontal fan the liquid comes right out of the center and then air comes out of the tips which is what atomizes it this is your fan control this is going to set the size of your fan so the wider your fan the uh the wider it is but there's gonna be less material in each specific area the smaller it is there's gonna be more material in a concentrated area but the fan will be smaller so this controls the amount of liquid that comes out if you're gonna reduce the size of your fan you also wanna reduce the amount of liquid that's coming out otherwise you're going to get puddles really fast down here this is your air control i don't use that because i got one of these cheap little air regulators that captures moisture from the line sometimes when you're using an air compressor there's moisture built up inside and that can come through so this traps moisture you know what this came with the kit that's right so get this kit it's so cheap it's so worth it you can control the amount of air i spray it about 15 or 20 psi at the gun that seems to work perfect for me when you're doing hvlp you want to get a piece of cardboard and just test your spray so again same thing you want to be about six to eight inches away and you want to test your spray now i have my fan really small from when we were doing those legs so i'm going to increase that i'm also going to increase my flow here and i'm just going to check that what you want to look for on your fan is you that you're getting about even material in this and then you're going to get a little bit of spray on the outside but it should be pretty much just looking like even material if you have a figure eight like this you want to adjust your air if you're not getting an it could be a non-enough material you want to play with the settings but you should be getting just a nice even oval of spray pattern one of the reasons that this is angled back is so that way you can be directly parallel to your material because if you're spraying like this your material is going to be concentrated at the bottom of your spray pattern same thing if you're spraying too far angled it's going to kind of kick that way so you want to always try and be parallel to your material you want your tip to be parallel to your material we're going to do the same things again we're going to flip this over we're going to get three coats on there starting with the edges the end grain and the knots and this is the reason that you do that is because when you flip it over you're going to hit those edges and end grain twice as much as you are the faces so those areas that absorb more material are going to get twice as many coats without you having to try and spend all this time working on just the edges okay here's another thing that can happen is like a little chunk of something flew in there lacquer is great because it dries so fast so this rarely happens but if it does just take you just take your finger take it out of there it's fine you're going to put you know another couple coats on it because it's self wetting you're not going to ever see that fingerprint okay now that we have three coats on both sides we're going to let that dry for about half an hour you want to make sure that it is really dry and feels sort of hard to the touch and then we're going to talk about our final coats okay now it's time to do our final pass you want to get some high grit sandpaper like 400 or 320 you want to sand it till the whole area is cloudy you want to use something sort of flat it doesn't have to be rock hard ladies gents but you do want it to be flat because you don't want to be digging into to areas because the point of this is to sort of flat down any very last minuscule high spots and get a very nice smooth finish and because lacquer is self-wetting this is such a great part of it also this works with water-based polyurethane you're going to do it you're just going to give it a quick wipe off and then you're going to spray one time you're going to keep your gun much further away you're going to do one time with the grain and then one time across the grain much farther away you sort of just want to mist the surface from a distance that's going to kind of just fill in everything and make it perfectly smooth so you want to get sanding so the whole surface is nice and evenly white and cloudy and then we're going to wipe that off and like i said we're going to do a pass this way and a pass this way from further away with less material if you're using hvlp you can even thin out your material a little bit more if you want to and after we do the flat areas we're going to take our sandpaper off and do the edges okay if your sandpaper starts to gum up like this it's real easy you can just take something with like an edge to it and those will actually scrape right off ooh that is rough on the ears sorry if that came across on the microphone but it will they'll just pop right off so don't just toss your sandpaper if you get those little gummed up spots but you do want to be checking for them because they're going to keep you from making contact with your surface in fact you can see right here that i had some gummed up pieces you can see like the lines where they drag through the dust [Music] all right last piece of advice before we spray is don't use a blower to get rid of this one of the great things about this is the lacquer dust fills any like loose grain so it gets in there and when you spray your last final coat it re-wets that dust and it's like a grain a clear grain filler but if you blow it out then you're going to be able to see that open grain through your finish you'll get little microscopic holes throughout your finish so don't blow it off just give it a just a wipe and it's okay if there's dust left it's just lacquer dust you just don't want big chunks sitting on [Music] that looked perfect i don't usually spray rattle cans and hvlp at the same time i think the rattle cans put down a lot more material than the hvlp at a time so it's important to move a little bit faster with the rattle cans it also is in a narrower fan pattern than the hvlp so it's easier to do legs and things like that without having to adjust anything rattle cans are just easy i love having around again i'll link everything i have i don't even think i guess the amazon links would be affiliate links but this is just stuff i use all the time this isn't sponsored or anything like that don't judge me for my planer snipe that i didn't see i had a little planer snipe at the end of this but other than that this is glass smooth it's got that beautiful satin look which is just gorgeous on furniture because it's not too glossy the glossier something it is the more it's going to highlight imperfections also of course like i said in the beginning it looks a lot more plasticky which is really it's good on things like humidors or maybe epoxy resin tables it's just gorgeous i don't know how else to say it um the the final result is so easy i think shooting this whole video took an hour and a half and you know we're setting up shots and all those things if i was finishing this myself i'd be done in 45 minutes now the key is don't get excited and start putting parts together until tomorrow give it 24 hours guys also i you know because we're always on a fast production schedule shooting video we moved that entry table into my house about an hour after i had finished this process and in the next day i was like man i had a headache all yesterday i don't know why and then i realized i walked out in my living room i was like oh it smells like lacquer in here so make sure you give it 24 hours before you give it to your client or move it to the house and start putting things back together like drawers and things like that hey if you want to support the channel head over to the cat's moses store pick up a dovetail jig a stop block or an apron guys stay safe in the shop thanks for watching have a wonderful day you

Channel: Jonathan Katz-Moses

Views: 115,659

Rating: 4.9595766 out of 5

Keywords: lacquer finish, woodworking, lacquer finish on wood, lacquer, wood finishing, wood finish, finishing, wood, spray lacquer, lacquer thinner, spraying lacquer, building, how to spray lacquer, hvlp, oil finish, finish, refinish, woodworking project, do it yourself, finishes, diy woodworking, woodworking creative, how to finish wood, furniture repair, hvlp spray gun, spray, hvlp sprayer, how to use, air compressor, lacquer finish repair

Id: ESSU7EmT-cE

Length: 18min 19sec (1099 seconds)

Published: Sun Jan 10 2021