High Gloss Finish For Wood Turnings

I'm going to show you how to create a high-gloss finish like this one it's really not too difficult this is a work that I did about twenty years ago with a gloss finish and you can see that the gloss is still and very great shape now when I started doing that I checked out a whole bunch of different kinds of varnish to try to get that finish and what I ended up with was Minwax homesman spar urethane I tried a lot of them that were very expensive this one is not expensive it's readily available and it was the best of the bunch by far this is a spar urethane which means it's formulated so that it will move with wood winter and summer as a humidity changes and it also has some ultraviolet inhibitors in it they're a fugitive of course but they'll help and it's of course waterproof and I use clear gloss read the instructions of you like but don't shake or stir this if it's clear gloss there is nothing in it to settle out and there is absolutely no reason to stir it or to shake it now the important thing about using this particular varnish this spar urethane is that it has to be fresh and there's a date code on the top of the can I hope you can see this here but though there's a four digit number right here in this case it says two nine five eight and what that means is that this varnish was made in the two hundred and ninety fifth day of 2018 so those first three digits represent the number of the day of the year and the last digit is the last digit in the year itself so in other words January first would be zero zero one nine if it were this year and the last day of this year since this is 2019 would be three six five nine so that's the date code check the date code and if it's anywhere near your old or older don't you bothered by you need fresh spar urethane for this to work now as even as much of this work that we do we never ever use up an entire can of this stuff because once you open it it goes bad pretty quickly so what we do instead of opening the can up is that we take it like this and poke a hole in the room on this side and then we'll do the same thing over here and go poke a hole in the rim on this side and then we have four half pint jars here and basically what we'll do is just decant this varnish into those four jars now we'll use the jars one at a time and you'll notice by the way that the color of this varnish as it comes out of the can here or the urethane is a kind of a gray purple color and that is the color that you'll see when it is fresh as it begins to age it will turn a kind of an amber color and once it turns that amber color it will begin to lose its ability to really flatten out and give you a fine gloss finish so those things are important and moving it or detaining it into these four different jars helps us a lot we usually even though we do this we usually will end up throwing away probably about a third to a half of the urethane because it will age before we get a chance to use it it's only a matter of two or three or four weeks once you've opened a can before it starts to turn amber and loses its ability to flatten or to level in the way that you really want it to but right now I want to make sure that these particular jars are clean and sealed properly now notice there's a little bit of varnish right on that edge there that I spilled when it came across and I'm gonna try to get that off of there and clean that the reason for that is that I don't want any varnish on this seal because as you take that on and off of there your little bits of it will Rai and then they'll get into your finish and you think you're getting dust or something and finish actually be little bits of dry urethane we tried preserving these jars by putting various gasses in you can buy a particular gas that is intended I think it's one of the brand names is blockage in that it's supposed to pervert preserve the varnish the urethane and we find that it really didn't make a lot of difference some perhaps but I think it's very difficult to get the blockage in in there without getting oxygen in with it we also since I have a TIG welder we have pure argon here and we do sometimes put argon in for the same reason and if you're very careful about how you do that I would say it probably does help but I've never even doing that never been able to use an entire can of urethane we'll use them one at a time the rest of them will stay in the cabinet in the dark you don't want to leave this stuff out in the light it's important that if you read the directions and don't follow them too carefully because one of the things that says here is to sand the entire surface very lightly with fine sandpaper before you put on another coat and they call very fine sandpaper 220 actually we sand these with 600 grit and it's not important to have a scratch pattern in there what is important between coats is to get all of that gloss off so that you have a dull surface that you're putting the next codon in with with urethanes you'll have a mechanical bond it's not like a lacquer where you spray one coat of lacquer on top of the other and they chemically bond together it doesn't do that so you've got to be sure you have all of that gloss off of there because if you don't the next coat you put on there will just peel off now we have this cherry vessel that has already had two coats of finish put on it it was sanded to about 400 grit and then we applied the first coat which on cherry of course soaks in pretty much we sanded that with some 600 grit paper that I'll show you here in a second and then we put on another coat and we can still see if you can catch the light as as it comes across you can still see the grain especially in the darker areas through the top of the finish now we're going to sand this with a with a an inertial sander this one is the sanding solution from the sanding glove it's my preferred one there are some copies out there if bothers you to buy other people's copies people that copy other people's work then you want to find the original sanding solution if you want to purchase one it comes with different accessories and so on and so forth and the pads can be changed and you can change the angles here this particular pad is a three inch pad and what we're going to be using on that is this 3m 260 L P 600 600 grit it's a ste rated abrasive and we're going to place that on the pad it's a hook and loop and we're gonna run the the lathe fairly quickly here and we're also going to be running dust collector back here we have a zero tolerance for dust in this studio and the way we do that is we have a dust collector set up with two drops to 4-inch drops for each lathe and what we're concerned about here is collecting the dust that floats around the air we don't care about any of the chips or any of the shavings they can fall on the floor do whatever we just want the dust that would get into our lungs to go in there so we have created a kind of a shroud around here by using this plastic and this piece of cardboard down here so that the air that rushes into there half come across this workpiece that means that all of the the dust that we're going to create here is going to be going into the dust collector and none of will come into our lungs and we have here a quartz halogen lamp a very strong lamp up here if there is any dust that floats up in the air I'll be able to see that in the in this light right here and then I will know that my setup is not quite right and we're not getting all the dust so we'll turn this on sorry for the noise but we're going to have to have that as we work here so we now have the dust going in here we're going to turn this on we're going to use our initial our inertial sander to sand this very quickly now we're gonna check it it's really important when you sand this that you get all of the gloss off now you can see the reflection in the light you can see that down deep and where we had that that open grain we're not going to be able to get down that deep but we've got the rest of this pretty well done and right up in here we didn't we couldn't get this with the inertial sander so we're going to use that piece of 600 grit 260 L we're going to turn our dust collector back on and we're going to get that now we're ready to go here and we're gonna use a foam brush and this is a particular gen je n it looks like an F but that's actually an N gen manufacturing company this is a two inch brush if you look online you can generally find these at a pretty decent price if you buy say a gross at a time we use a lot of them so usually by about 300 at a time now this piece is big enough that I will not be able to put all of the finish on it in one at one particular time I'm going to have to do sections of it the reason for that is that this urethane sets up very quickly and if I do try to do this whole thing and then go back over here it's it will have set up so much that the varnish or the urethane will pull and then we'll have a mess and that will not work so we're going to turn the lathe on here we're gonna run this at about let's say 20 20 to 30 rpm and we're gonna figure on doing about two to three brush widths down here to start and we're gonna we're going to dip that brush right down in there and get it as full of as much barneys as we possibly can and we're going to twirl it like this so it won't dribble as we come across and then we're gonna go roughly one brush width per revolution as we put that varnish on really pretty doggone thick and we come back over here and go little ways try to get maybe about half of the vessel alright now I'm gonna take the brush and I'm going to do this to make a dry top on the brush notice that we've got a lot of varnish a lot of urethane down here and that's almost dry so I'm gonna start around so I'm around the bottom there and then I'm going to come across at about a quarter of an inch for revolution and at a 45 degree angle here and I'm putting a little bit of pressure on but note that the excess varnish is collecting at the lower end of the brush and is dripping off on the cardboard we place down here the top corner of the brush isn't quite touching you don't want that to touch because if it does it'll pile up a little Ridge varnish as you come across so I'm gonna come over here and I'm just seeing I'm getting to the point where we and have all the wine so I'm gonna quit right there and I'm gonna get another load of varnish I'm gonna pick that up and I'm gonna start here and go back that way and see if I can pick that up I bye now I could not go clear back to the beginning and I'm gonna roll in here I'm gonna do this and again screed off the excess here and we're gonna come back and overlap just a little bit place our brush there and start across again now that varnish down at the end where we started they're urethane is getting to the point where it's going to begin to set up and if we went back and tried to do something with it now to correct a mistake or anything like that we would create ridges that would not level out and what we want is for this finished a level as we go notice we're losing a lot of the urethane here that's because I put on plenty so I'd be sure to come all the way across here with one pass and be able to get the entire piece done now as I come across this end here notice I'm intentionally being very careful to go slow beginners mistake that is often done is when you get to this end you go off very quickly I'm going to take the brush and see it's very heavily a lot of varnish here and not a lot there so we're gonna go on the inside and we're gonna come across again with the dry end of the brush trailing and the wet end of the brush applying varnish as we go ahead and then we're gonna once again go very slowly here and not just pop off of this end and make sure that we've got it covered completely now we're going to shut the lathe off and turn it by hand while we come back here and catch the light and make sure that we don't have any spots I'm looking at reflections and I expect to see reflections all over the piece if I missed a spot that would not be reflected there so that's how we put on the coat now we're gonna let the lathe run we could slow it down a little bit if you want we're gonna let it run for 15 minutes and I'm gonna set a timer so I'm sure that we know that it's at sets up for at least 15 minutes before we close the lathe shut the lathe down now that'll guarantee that we don't get any runs if we got any areas that were heavy enough to create runs now we're going to do that again this vessel is a little smaller it's only about seven inches tall and I'm should be able to do the entire vessel in just one pass so again we're going to load that brush way up and then we're going to twirl it so it doesn't dribble across and then we're gonna come one brush width for revolution just getting a load of varnish on this piece back up here get this top good it's gonna have plenty of varnish everywhere and we dry off one end of the brush push it around there so it comes around onto the bottom a little bit and then comes across now you notice the dripping see the excess urethane that's dripping off and again note that the top corner of the brush is not touching the work and we're creating a very even thin coat of urethane across the piece come down here come around very very slowly back across this top and get that edge and then inside again and that's it you

Channel: Stephen Sinner

Views: 42,948

Keywords: Wood Lathe, Steve Sinner, Minwax Helmsman, Urethane, High Gloss, Advanced Lathe Tools, Gloss Finish, Woodturning, advancedlathetools.com, Wood Turning

Id: MVQEJf7KkoQ

Length: 17min 8sec (1028 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 25 2019