Best Ways to Fill Wood Grain | Which is Best?

what's up youtube welcome back to the shop ah the majestic oak it reminds us of hiking in nature tree houses and our kitchen cabinets hey if you love your oat kitchen cabinets right on we all have our taste but for those of us who grew up in the 80s and early 90s we remember everything being oak and some of us are a little bit burnt out on it so today i'm going to show you how you can take that grainy oak and use it to your advantage or eliminate it completely i have five red oak boards right here three of them we're gonna use for painting two of them we're gonna apply a finish so let's start with the painting first let's say that you love the durability of wood but you're not a huge fan of seeing the wood grain or the texture maybe you're building a table and you want a smoother surface than the wood you have can provide or maybe it's time for you to finally do that kitchen remodel and you decide you want to paint your kitchen cabinets there's only one thing in the way that pesky grain well there's ways that we can deal with that i have three oak boards here one of them we're gonna paint and that's gonna be our sample board that we can test against the other two in which we're gonna fill the grain prior to painting i'm gonna show you two different ways to fill the grain the first one involves wood filler easy enough the second one drywall mud you heard me right drywall mud but let's start with the wood filler because i think that one's more commonly known for today's test i'm going to use timbermate wood filler now it's a little bit more expensive than some of the other stuff you can get at the hardware store but i think you get what you pay for it's a really good quality wood filler it resists cracking and if it dries out you can add a little bit of water to it and it will revitalize it and that's really kind of what we're going to do today is we're going to mix this with some water and make a slurry i'm scooping some of this out and put it in this container which we can mix with water now the good thing about this is the water will evaporate eventually and when it does all of this is still reusable so don't feel like you're wasting any just get a little bit of water at a time i'm going to mash this up i kind of want to make it everyone says like peanut butter i like to say a little bit runnier than peanut butter not everything can be peanut butter if everything is peanut butter then nothing is peanut butter now you can take a spreader or your spouse's credit card and use it to spread this through all of the wood grain trying to fill the whole thing up [Music] [Music] what i like about this wood filler is it does dry pretty quickly and i'm taking my spreader here and going with the grain to get it into as many of those nooks and crannies as i can i'm going to let this dry it won't take very long it's about the same amount of times it takes for water to evaporate off of a board and then i can look at it if there's any spots that are missed i can always apply a second coat to it so it is not a big deal and then all of this that's left over is not wasted you can scoop this put it right back in your container and when it dries out it'll be good as new the next method i'm going to use is drywall mud this is basic joint compound you can get at the hardware store so i'm going to apply it here on my board but unlike the wood filler i don't want to coat the entire thing it just takes a long time for mud to dry so i'm going to make sure that whenever i apply it i'm skimming it and only leaving stuff that's in the texture of the wood i don't really want a whole lot on the surface that's looking pretty good so we're going to let this dry and once it's dry we can check it and see if we need to apply any more coats [Music] i sanded all the sample boards and now we're ready to apply primer so first observations obviously you can tell the middle one is drywall mud because it's white that grain really pops with the white in there the one with the filler looks just like a muted oak and if you didn't have a control board without having any filler or anything on it you might even think that this is just a dusty piece of wood but that's because the color that i picked for the filler was a white oak color so it just kind of mutes everything and then again we have our control board with nothing on it but it has been sanded all these have been sanded to 180 grit because i want to make sure it's all the same and now i'm gonna apply some primer i'm not applying the primer or the paint very thick i'm not a fan of the look of really thick paint so i know that there's some people that would say don't even bother going through the wood grain filling process because just put a couple more layers of paint on it and you're good i just don't like that look i don't like that it looks layered so i am applying one coat of primer one coat of paint and then we'll do the comparison after applying the same amount of primer on all three boards i let it dry now it's time to apply the actual paint so i'm gonna apply one coat of this semi-gloss white paint with this brush let's see how it goes [Music] our pain samples are dry so now we can see what the results are and we'll start with the control board this is the one that we sanded to 180 grit no grain was filled with this it was just one coat of primer and one coat of paint and you can see every bit of the grain in this board all of it now that might be looked better than the raw wood to you i don't know it's up to you and you could probably fill in some of the grain with extra coats of primer extra coats of paint but then again if you do that then you're kind of getting that layered paint effect and it's up to you if that's the look you want now let's look at the two that had the grain filled we have the one with the drywall mud and the wood filler we'll start with the one with the mud this one looks so much better than the one without having the grain filled as i move it around i am seeing there is some grain it's hard to see on camera but in the light i can see there's a clear cathedral pattern right here i can see a couple of streaks here on the sides one here on this side over here as well you might be able to get rid of that by applying another coat of mud on this so applying the mud waiting 24 hours for all of it to dry sanding it down applying another coat sanding it down etc and it would have probably filled in all of the grain but i only did one coat of mud and i can see that it didn't fill all of it for me but still a really good outcome especially compared to the control board now we'll look at the one that has the wood filler in this case i can't see any grain at all all of it looks like it was filled nope i cannot tell i can't tell where the grain is so i would say as far as the looks go in the one-time application the wood filler did better than the mud but the mud was much better than the control what can we take away from this well let's do a comparison when it comes to applying the mud and the filler the application process itself i would probably say the mud was a little bit easier it's already mixed up compared to mixing wood filler with water and spreading around but really the wood filler part which wasn't that hard so you know i don't know if i had the split hairs i would say the mud was probably a little bit easier to apply the next consideration would be cost how much would it cost to do a project with the wood filler compared to the mud and i would say probably the mud ones out on this joint compounds just much cheaper than it is to buy the equivalent version of wood filler so it really depends on the size of the project if cost is going to be a true factor for you if we're going to talk about the amount of time it took i would say that the wood filler wins hands down wood filler really wasn't that much harder to apply than the mud and it dried super fast 30 minutes or so the wood filler was completely dry and ready to go while the mud took much much longer to dry and whenever it comes to the appearance i'm going to be subjective and say that the wood filler looked better but again your results may vary it really depends on how you apply this stuff if you applied a thick coat of mud maybe that would have worked if you used a different brand maybe that would have worked so i'm not saying that the wood filler is better than the mud i'm saying in my test samples what i saw the wood filler performed better in this specific test so here's my takeaways from doing this painted test and that is using wood filler or mud is a fantastic option to fill the grain you can't really go wrong with either one it depends on your shop and your skills and the materials you use to determine which one you want to use this is a subjective test this is not done in any sort of laboratory whatsoever and there's going to be some opinion based on that you are having to use my eyes to look at the boards so i would say that if you're interested in doing something like this maybe you should try this test on your own shop and determine if you like the results of either one of these those paint samples were really cool but as a woodworker i don't always paint stuff i like the natural look of wood so how can i take a piece of wood here make a table top a desk where it looks like wood but it's smooth you know like when you're riding you don't want like those bumps because it's not smooth you know you don't tell them about the writing bumps you know i'm talking about so how can we get rid of that well we can do the same thing that we did with the paint we can fill it with wood filler but instead of just using a generic color wood filler i'm actually going to contrast it to the wood i'm going to use walnut colored now you could use different colors for this i think with red oak red probably looks pretty good darker browns looks good i don't know that i would go black just as a personal taste i think the red and the black kind of contrast a little bit too much but this is all subjective walnut looks cool it's got a little tinge of red in a little bit of purples in it i think it'll look really good so we're gonna do the same thing we did with the paint test i'm gonna make a slurry add this we're gonna put it on the board let it dry sand it down and then we can apply our [Music] finish [Music] [Music] i sanded the board that had the walnut filler down to 180 grit and then i also sanded the control board to 180 grit so this one has no filler in it whatsoever and these came from the same board i just cut it in half so now i'm going to apply finish i'm going to apply a couple coats of shellac mainly because shellac is super easy to apply and it's really quick for a project like this [Music] i apply two coats of shellac to both these boards and i can say they really do look different this one over here i apply the walnut wood filler into the grain and i think it gives it more of a of a rustic look i think it provides a little bit more character and the wood overall looks darker compared to this one in which nothing was filled in and it was applied and it kind of has that generic oaky look that i think that we're all familiar with when i run my hand across both of them i can say that the one with the wood filler obviously feels really really smooth compared to the one without any sort of filler whatsoever but really we got to do the writing test remember because we don't we don't want the so according to the writing test well again no brainer the one with the wood filler absolutely performed much much better just like with our painting test this is subjective because we're going to go off of what your opinion is of these types of woods you may love this particular look here and hate this one or vice versa i can say that when it comes to the two of these i think this one has a cool rustic look to it it gives it a little bit of character while that one looks like 1992. but that's just my opinion your opinion may vary and that's cool too the point in this test was really to show you that you can take a wood that's really porous like oak that is not smooth and you can make it baby butt smooth and give it some really cool character by using the grain to your advantage instead of trying to eliminate it all together with and just by doing that you can get a completely different look out of the same piece of oak while my tests were definitely not scientific hopefully they at least gave you some food for thought on how you can handle wood grain so if you enjoyed this sort of content then please subscribe to the channel i put out videos every week next week's video is going to be on building some shelves and we may or may not break something so until we meet again get in your shop and build something awesome

Channel: Newton Makes

Views: 56,889

Keywords: diy woodworking, woodworking projects, workshop tools, do it yourself, newton makes, wood grain filler, best wood filler, wood filler, painting furniture, painting oak, how to paint kitchen cabinets, how to paint wood furniture, how to paint oak cabinets, painting wood furniture, painting oak furniture, painting oak cabinets, prep cabinets for paint, paint wood, how to paint wood cabinets, timbermate grain filler, fill wood grain, how to fill wood grain, hide wood grain

Id: Xkczj6MQ2Vs

Length: 14min 5sec (845 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 01 2021