Choosing the Right Wood Finish for your Project

this video is sponsored by environs hey everyone Mike along here so this week I'm talking about finishes so I've gone through all the drawers in my shop and I pulled out all the finishes that I use on a semi to really regular basis and I'm gonna go through them categorically and talk about when you use them and why and whether you need this many finishes in your shop or not the truth is you probably don't so I know that nobody wants to hear this but the truth is that the most important part of finishing a project well has nothing to do with the finish that you choose it has to do with sanding yeah nobody likes it nobody likes it I do have a tip though to make it a little easier and more tolerable whenever I have a moment where I don't know what to do I can't solve a problem I don't know how to join a piece to another piece I'll sit in sand for a little bit and it clears my head it gives me a chance to to really spend time with the work piece and then it doesn't save this huge chunk of sanding to the very end because a lot of times sanding is half the time that you spend in your project and so if you break it up into little chunks it's not nearly as bad when it comes to what specific grits I use when I stand I power sand from 120 to 220 and then I hand Sam 220 to 320 the 220 is a chance for me to investigate make sure the power sanding went well and if there are any swirl marks I can correct those at that phase and then the 320 grit is the final polish the only exception to that is water-based finishes because they raise the grain so whenever you use a water-based finish you need to be mindful of that I never go beyond 220 with water-based finishes until the second coat then it's 320 from that point forward so you've sanded your piece and it's looking really nice now you need to decide whether you want to stain it or not staining is totally an option and the reason why people stain furniture pieces is mostly to maintain color over time wood has a tendency to change colors when it's exposed to you these so the most extreme examples are things like Purple Heart and cherry where you can set them out in the Sun and watch them change things like walnut and maple are a little less perceptible but they do lighten or darken over time walnut especially can can go pretty blonde so a lot of times people will add a stain to it to maintain that warmth if you're working with soft woods you're gonna want to use some sort of pre stain the reason for this is that soft woods have really dense sections and really soft sections and the soft sections absorb the stain in really deeply in the dense sections it'll just sit on the surface so by pre staining it you essentially make the surface much more consistent it's hard to get a good stain on a soft wood but this is your best shot at doing it if you watch my video on making would look like steel you would have seen me use shellac as a pre stain it makes for really good pre stain it seals the wood really well and it allows just enough absorption for you to still put stain over the surface of it you just want to use one light coat and sand it back before you apply the stain when I say wood stain this is probably what you're thinking about and it's super common it's really easy to find you can find it at hardware stores and it's great for making wood look a little bit more antique so if that's the look that you're going for there are loads of different colors of this stuff and and I would say go for that I don't use this very much anymore and and the reason for that is that it has a really long dry time and I find that it's a little bit hard to work with I've moved over to water-based stains so I am not sponsored by general finishes but I probably should be because I love their products they make some of the best finishes and they make some really good water-based stains and this is these are pretty much the stains that I go to if I want to change the color of a piece of wood I will go with general finishes one thing is if you are used to using these you should do some practice runs with this stuff because it behaves very differently it dries a lot quicker and you do have to sand in between coats a lot because it dries so quickly you can pretty much put a top coat on it within the day as opposed to this stuff which can sometimes take a week the last section on stains that I'm going to talk about I'm gonna call the art material section and I've worked in a bunch of museums and frame shops and and art galleries over the years and the people that work there are all artists so they experiment with stains from art stores and there's a lot of options out there the first one I'm gonna talk about is India Inc and you've probably heard about this it's a really good look it's really good look especially for open grain woods things like Oaks and walnuts because it shows off that grain with nothing else so it goes completely black it's sort of a false show bond look without the need to burn a piece of furniture the second of the art finishes is acrylic paint this is actually an option this stuff is graphite gray it's made by golden it actually has graphite powder in it so once this stuff dries you can burnish it and make it shine it's not great for furniture pieces but it's really good for frames I framed a lot of pencil drawings with this and hence an awesome look you do want to put a top coat over the top of this because it'll just protect that shine once you've got it burnished up properly it'll probably take a few coats of this as well and you want to water them down you don't want to use them straight out of the tube so third one I want to talk about is this and this stuff is the magic I love this stuff it is the best wood blackening I have found for walnut and it's a homemade mixture so what this is is 50% Mars black oil paint mixed with a medium that's called either liquid original or guilted those are just two different brand names for the same thing I've got a bottle of guilt kid right here so this stuff is a it's basically a dryer it dries the paint a lot quicker you could use just straight oil paint it would be totally fine but it would take about a month to dry whereas this stuff it takes like two to three days and two or three days may sound like a long time but it's really not this stuff is a one and done top coat so after you've put this on that's it you don't need to add a finish I wouldn't use this on like a table top but it's pretty much great for everything else anything that isn't a work surface this will be plenty of finish for that wood topcoats so these are my go-to general finish's once again they are awesome finishes so this is kind of synonymous with a wipe on Polly why wipe-on poly is a brand name but this this stuff is you were thinned out polyurethane finish that itself levels it's really rich I want to use this on woods that you're trying to enrich so darker woods take this really well things like walnuts and cherries I use the water-based stuff for anything I don't want to go yellow if I have whitewashed stained a piece or if I'm using like Baltic birch plywood and I don't want it to turn amber this is the stuff that I go to it's also dries really fast which is super nice you can put like a coat on every two hours or so sometimes less this stuff you're gonna want to wait 24 hours between the coats so you're probably saying yourself if these two work so well then why do you need all of these and the truth is I probably don't like I could probably get rid of all these from my shop and be just fine these are my go-to they are super strong they're really robust I use them all the time they're easy to apply and I can just I can just straight-up trust them so I do love these finishes I have these for specialty projects so all these finishes can loosely fit into the category of oils the reason why I say loosely is that the only true oil that's here is linseed oil there are true tung oils and there are true t-coils but you have to get those from specialty manufacturers these have been cut with solvents like mineral spirits there's loads of different reasons why you want to choose linseed oil and usually it's for people who want to mix their own finishes they're using it for oil paint medium or they can even use it as like just a quick way to make the grain pop it's very yellow so be aware of that it can be a beautiful finish when applied correctly but it takes forever to dry tung oil and teak oil are a little bit quicker to dry tung oil it comes out more natural looking and teak oil comes out more Orange tung oil is used in indoor applications teak oil can be used for outdoor applications so a lot of times this is applied to outdoor furniture that is made of teak rocks and Danish oil they have a lot of additives in them and and water LOX is made of a mixture of different oils resins and solvents so it makes it really easy to work with much faster to dry it's still slower than a polyurethane to dry and it's way more toxic spelling it's it's supposedly a lot stronger than a Pelle urethane but that it's not been my experience I have found that the armour seal is just as strong as the wire locks I'll use this on specialty projects usually when I want a strong finish that'll make the grain pop a lot more than the polyurethane will so I use it on the Murphy bar build if you saw that video Danish Oil generally is used for furniture restoration or to get that old-world hand rubbed look it comes in a variety of different tones the medium in the dark just have some stain in them I tend to gravitate towards just using a natural but if I'm repairing a piece of furniture that has a chip taken out of it or something like that a lot of times I'll use the medium or dark to kind of color match it the main thing with using Danish oil is you want to do a flood coat and then all the progressive coats after that are super thin and you want to wipe as much of it off as possible otherwise this will get very sticky so I also wanted to throw shellac into the mix not because it's an oil but because you can use it as an alternative to something like linseed oil this really brings out the grain in wood without the dry time of oils and it's really easy to use it dries super fast it's not very strong on as a surface finish so if you're gonna have this exposed to any sort of liquids or anything like that I would go for something like armored seal as a top coat but you can definitely use this as a way to bring out the iridescent sand wood so real quick I wanted to talk about shop safety which is very important when you are working with hazardous chemicals so things like water locks and really spray lacquer this stuff is really high in VOCs and you need to wear some sort of protection when you use it so I like to use a respirator this is a respirator this is a dust mask these are dust filters these are for chemicals so make sure when you're using one of these you've got these on there the other thing is these don't last forever and when you storm you need a storm in plastic and and even after that once they're opened and activated they only have a certain shelf life so make sure you change them off then the other thing you can do is give yourself a shop air filter and this one is made by envira cleanse they are the sponsor of this week's video and I love this thing it is a hospital grade HEPA filter in a really nice compact size this thing is made for a thousand square feet which is like over double the size of this space so I'm really happy to have this in the shop I'm happy because winter is coming and I'm gonna have to put the shop door down at some point and this will filter out all those harmful chemicals so thank you and buyer cleanse if you are interested in picking up one of their models which I highly recommend check out the link down below there's a discount code for 10% if you enter all ten at checkout alright we are almost done here I got a couple more finishes left to talk about and then I'm going to do a rapid-fire question and answer session with some questions that I got from my Instagram followers but first let's talk about spray finishes spray lacquer I use this fairly often in my shop and I'll use it when I need to finish something quickly you can get a lot of coats on in a relatively short period of time and it's a really strong finish the downside of it is it has a tendency to look a little bit plasticky but if you're looking for a super gloss finish there's nothing better than the spray lacquer spray polyurethane I keep this around mostly for job site work I will spray the back side of a cabinet with it if I don't want it to absorb moisture things like that it's usually good for touch-up I don't often use this on a full furniture piece but it is super handy to have wax so this is pre wax paste wax there's a saying once you use wax you can't go back and it's really true it resists a whole lot of other finishes so if you plan on refinishing a piece of furniture and it's got wax on the surface it can be a real pain you have to sand it way down a lot of times you can't get it out of the pores of the wood so wax is a choice that you can't really turn back from I don't really use this on proper pieces of furniture the only time I will use a wax is on in this case shop furniture and in this case beat-up old antiques this looks really good for restoring an old antique where you kind of like the rough edge of it and you want to keep that edge exposed so you just wipe on some brie wax antique stores use this stuff all the time and it's great stuff food-safe finishes so there are some options for food-safe finishes but it's pretty limited there are some people who say that polyurethane when dried is food safe I'm not gonna take sides on that debate but there are some here that I know confidently are completely food safe and interestingly enough shellac is back shellac is actually made by a beetle the Lac beetle and it's just like little flakes that it produces so it's sort of like a bee where it makes a hive these make little flakes I think out of tree sap and those could dissolve into alcohol and when it's dry it's completely safe and a lot of times people use this for kids toys it's great for that application but it's not great for things like cutting boards or spoons or bowls because it does break down with a lot of exposure to water for that I like to use mineral oil or mineral oil mixed with beeswax and this is what I use at home on my countertops I have butcher block countertops and I use this stuff all the time it's really handy to have around it does need to be reapplied fairly often so another option is salad bowl finish and this is a lot stronger than any of the other finishes here one thing that did dis concern me is that it is a petroleum product and it says that it's it's non-toxic win fully cured so you can make your own determination on that I have used it on some spoons and it has held up but whether it's food safe or not I'm not really sure outdoor finishes so there's a lot of options out there I already talked about teak oil my feeling is that the best outdoor finish for a piece of wood is paint and then everything else after that is it's gonna require a good bit of maintenance so even like Thompson's WaterSeal or varnish requires it to be sanded down and refinished every every one to two years so just be aware of that don't use polyurethanes outdoors while your thing is meant for interior situations varnish is your outdoor alternative to a polyurethane alright so that is pretty much every finish that I have in my shop and I hope you guys learned something and I hope that this was helpful let me know if you got any extra questions down and comments down below and if you have a finish that I I don't know about where I didn't mention in here please talk about in the comments that's super helpful I want to thank you guys for sticking around and watching I want to thank envira Clint's for sponsoring this video and I'm gonna take the last few minutes of the video to answer some questions that I got on Instagram throat's a little sore at this point if it took it for a while it's not Daniel asks how should you combine finish and paint example part of the project is painted in part natural this is a very good question and usually my go-to is water-based polyurethane it goes really well with paint it's not gonna give you the rich finish of oil but adding oil over the top of paint is kind of a bad idea it tends to go yellow over time and change the color so I definitely suggest the water-based polyurethane duty wood works asks does spray lacquer count as cheating it's just too quick and yeah Johnny you're cheating don't use that stuff made by Mary Lou asks what is your recommendation for a wooden sink if it's actually a sink that's made of wood I would go with epoxy that is the only thing that's gonna hold up over time if you're talking about a wooden countertop around a sink I would go with wax because you just are constantly reapplying it a lot of other stuff is gonna break down over time common carve asks I'm working on a walnut chair with some epoxy accents what makes the walnut just pop and the finish that I didn't talk about which it should have but I don't have any much shop is the maker brand finish and that's really good for this application because it's a wax and oil-based finish and and it goes through the top of epoxy really well my brother asks is there anything I can't use brie wax for it will end on that my dad loves real acts he puts it on everything and no Keith you could put this stuff on anything

Channel: Michael Alm

Views: 123,735

Rating: 4.9570155 out of 5

Keywords: wood finishes, wood finish, wood finishing, wood finishing basics, staining wood, how to finish wood, woodworking, diy wood finish, oil finishes for wood, how to finish furniture, how to finish a tabletop, best wood finish, best wood finish for woodworkers, best wood finish for pine, best wood finish for outdoor furniture, choosing a wood finish, Danish oil, tung oil, linseed oil, waterlox, polyurethane, beginner woodworking, easy wood finish, polycrylic, spray lacquer on wood

Id: bUQXqvUkbsY

Length: 17min 12sec (1032 seconds)

Published: Sat Sep 28 2019