How to Finish a Table - How to Apply Rubio Monocoat

hey this is ken with blacktail studio and this week i will explain why this slab is so wet show you how to get a perfect finish in a very dusty shop that is also super durable and explain why i basically never ever use stain and still get wood that looks like that stay tuned the finish we're going to be using is called a hard wax finish which you basically wipe it on wipe it off and the downside to it is it shows every possible sanding floss so we need to be really really good at sanding and i do recommend checking out my blog on sandy because that's going to go a little bit deeper die than i'm going to show here but sanding is critical and that's why you see i use that light stick to check and inspect every possible flaw for this particular finish we're going to water pop in between every single grit so after i got done sanding with a hundred grit i go with a damp rag and wipe the whole thing down and this is gonna raise the grain and this is something this manufacturer specifically recommends doing although this technique i picked up from stumptown reclaimed which is a really cool talented woodworker who had a lot more experience with this particular finish i have a quick tip for you if you're going to round over your edges with a router is i sand with 100 good then 120 grit then i will round my edges over with this eighth inch router bit and then finish sanding with 150 and 180 which will remove any of those marks that router base plate might leave right after i use the router i will hand sand my edges with that 180 grit which is my final grit and this will enable me to again remove any scratches that my hand sanding might have left on the top of the table there is not much more boring to watch than someone saying so i am showing this pretty quick but this takes me about half a day to sand a table like this again water popping in between every single grit 100 120 150 finishing at 180 which is what we have right here and i really like this mesh sandpaper by markets america abranet abernath not sure exactly how to pronounce it but it works really well especially on epoxy when you're going through this sanding you just want everything to look very very uniform you won't remove all the scratches because it's still 180 grit you still be able to see the scratches you just want it to look kind of like a uniform frosted pattern and for this finish they want it as clean as possible so i blow it off with compressed air and i'm using mineral spirits they recommend using their brand specific raw wood cleaner but i was told the mineral spirits will work fine so that's what i ended up using for this table so wipe it down and then let this air dry off which took a few hours actually the finish i'm going to be using is called rubio monaco and it is primarily a hardwood flooring finish but it's kind of taken off in popularity with the furniture makers over the past few years and i'm doing their two part which is the main and then this accelerator and this makes it so there's only a one week cure time which you can use it after about 24 hours but it will have full protection after just about seven days so you just mix them up and then start troweling it on and for walnut i am told to primarily travel it on before you buff it on so you you'll see me buff it in on this table but i did learn that it's a little better to trowel it on first and then buff it any time you're finishing a table you don't want to leave one side finished for any longer than you have to so i finished the bottom then basically immediately flip it over and start finishing the top and this is to prevent any warping that can happen by leaving one side finished and the other side unfinished which i've actually had happen on tables that i left once i finished overnight to come back and finish the next day and ran into problems with it having cupped just overnight for this finish you want to apply just as much rubio as the wood will accept so i'm going to trowel it on there then i'm going to start buffing it and if i notice any areas look a little drier than other areas i'll add a little bit more but i'm not going to completely just flood it on there and what we're going gonna do is get it completely saturated make sure all the areas look like they've absorbed as much as they possibly can and after about five to ten minutes we're going to come back and wipe all of it off and rubio always says you can't wipe too much off but you can leave too much on so just keep that in mind when you are buffing it off for the sides i didn't use my buffer i just went through with a little cut off piece of white pad buffed it down and i am using a cotton terry towel here this just kind of buffing it off and it kind of had to put your back into it it started to set up just a little bit and this is what it looks like after the first coat and honestly it doesn't look great now but you don't need to get frustrated because we are going to make it look a lot better i mentioned this finish is called rubio monaco which means one coat and they really pride themselves on being the one coat finish however if you really put their feet to the coals they will admit that walnut can benefit from a second coat and so i talked with the people at rubio found out the best way to apply a second coat is to use a maroon pad like this and it's not quite as easy as just going and scuffing it with your hand so i put it on my orbital sander and just like the sanding you want it to look completely uniform and some of my sanding marks didn't look great after that first coat so i'm going to go back and kind of finesse all of those out and make it nice frosted even look in the end and i spent my quite a bit of time here probably spent a good hour sanding this with a couple different maroon pads any part of the table that isn't sanded with this maroon pad is gonna look basically shinier than the rest of it so you do want to hit the entire table not just the epoxy hit the wood the sides all of it before we apply the second coat of rubio monocoat for the second coat i did everything the same except i didn't wipe it down with mineral spirits i just wiped it off with a microfiber towel and blew it off with compressed air and here is what it should look like you can see it's not completely like frosted glass but it's pretty close and it's as good as i could get it so make it as uniform as you possibly can and you'll see in the end it evens out really really nicely i did a finished video for the osmo wood wax and for that finish you really have to use a buffer and this finish you don't really have to use a buffer i use it because it just makes my life a little bit easier but you really can just wipe it on and then wipe it off one tip that you will see me do here in just a second is after it's all wiped off it's coming back with a clean white pad and buffing it again and rubio says this will build up a little bit of extra sheen and you can see on the second coat we actually got a lot more sheen the first coat was really just matte and now i would say we are a full blown satin not quite a semi-gloss but definitely a satin finish the wood looks essentially perfect now you can see the black looks a little bit uneven and this all evened out as it cured overnight i'll give you a good thorough walk around in the end but for now it looks a lot better than it did after the first coat and there was one more step that rubio recommends and i've heard some mixed reviews from people i don't know that i noticed a big difference but it is applying their maintenance oil the same way that we did the finish so you buff it in wipe it all off and this is supposed to give you a small bump in sheen which i'm not so sure i noticed if you use the accelerator like i did the table will be ready for heavy use in a week you could use it lightly in about 24 to 48 hours but if you don't use the accelerator you just have to wait about three weeks before exposing it to water but i will give you all the angles i could think of to show you and i would love to hear from you guys in the comments what you guys think of this finish if this is enough sheen too much sheen if you like the mat better or if you like maybe a more glossy table i mentioned stain in the title of this video because so many people think that you stain wood on a table like this and i basically never use stain stain mutes the colors it just dulls everything and makes it really look fake so what you want to do is you want to find the wood species that is naturally the color that you want and that is sometimes easier said than done because a slab like this costs about a thousand dollars whereas you may have an old chunk of fur that you want to look like this and the spoiler is you can't you cannot stain something to make it look like real walnut and that's a bummer i wish you could but you really can't so don't stain your projects find the wood that is naturally the color you want your finished product to be a lot of you have been asking for this finished video that i swear i am working on i'm going to be doing a full hard core comparison between this finish otis oil osmo any hard wax finish that i can think of but i did want to show you a quick water test this was a fin a piece i finished a few months ago with rubio monaco and dumped some water on it and as i was filming i thought it was kind of cool because it was probably two three months old and it still just beads off so kind of neat to see just how good the water repellent is but decided to pour some water on there set this cup on there let it hang out for about 25 minutes then when i came back just wiped it off with a dry paper towel and you will see initially it still looks wet even after i wipe it off and you'll see a mark here in just a second when i lean it up you can faintly see some of the marks but after about 10 minutes of air drying it completely goes away and i will do a more in-depth finish test i'd love to hear from you guys in the comments what you think i should test it with maybe hot sauce or beer or wine things like that so let me know in the comments what needs to be included in this finished test video where i compare all the different finishes again this is not a sponsored video and they'll probably be some of you in there that say some of the color or green or burl in this top was a water spot and you'll just have to take my word for it there was absolutely no spots left on that top rubio does make a specific soap that is made just for this finish that will never dull it if you do use some other harsher chemicals that maybe dull it over time you can always come back and give it a quick refresh with their main toilet just like this just wipe it on and wipe it off i have a pretty comprehensive blog on my website with lots of articles on how to sand wood how to build an epoxy table how to build a live edge table how to buy live edge wood and i will have a step-by-step guide on how to apply this rubio up shortly so by the time you watch this video check out my blog it'll probably already be up but for now i wanted to give you the step-by-step written instructions in case anything wasn't clear because we got to cram a lot of information in pretty quick so hope this step-by-step guide helps and let me know if anything isn't clear in the comments i will be sure to answer any questions down there if you've made it to the end of one of my videos before you know i like to give credit to people that make it this far in the video if you haven't made it this far before first off welcome i really appreciate you making it this far but start your question or comment with my name cam cam and that will let me know that you made it all the way to the end of the video and i promise i will answer all of your questions or comments first and again thank you so much for making it this far on the video and please subscribe for more videos just like this one

Channel: Blacktail Studio

Views: 580,675

Rating: 4.9391818 out of 5

Keywords: rubio monocoat, odie's oil, odies oil, osmo oil, how to finish a table, how to stain wood, wood stain, minwax stain, how to woodworking, diy projects, how to apply rubio, how to use odies oil, how to get a perfect finish, wood stain colors, walnut stain, dark walnut stain

Id: DrF-UWvcB6I

Length: 10min 10sec (610 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 23 2020