I Applied New Veneer To A Laminate Top

on today's episode i'll refinish this old nightstand and put some new walnut veneer over the old laminate top i found this in a thrift store and the finish was in bad shape it's got a few chips in the veneer that i'll have to fix and the top is a laminate with some fake wood grain on it and it's not very attractive so i'll be replacing that with some real walnut veneer i began by removing the old finish i was able to scrape off most of it it was a thin lacquer finish that scraped off easily but i needed to use a different technique for the inside because it was just too tight to get the scraper in there first i did take off the back panel which looked to be something like masonite but it had a fake wood grain on the interior side so instead of scraping it off i used a stripper and this is qcs by stripwell and this worked well to get the finish off on the interior once i got all the finish off i sprayed some water on it just to get an idea of the natural color of the wood and to make sure there were no stains or anything like that that would pop up and the water gives you an idea of what it would look like if you just put a clear finish on it and then i could sand it all with some 180 grit sandpaper and here it is all stripped and sanded next i worked on the laminate top and i wanted to apply some new veneer to this so i first roughed up the surface with some sandpaper just to get rid of the gloss and to rough it up a bit so the veneer has an easier time sticking to it and the veneer i'm using is a self-sticking veneer so you just need to peel off the backing and then put it on you don't need to apply any contact cement or anything like that so it's pretty easy especially on a small surface like this on a larger surface it can be a little trickier but this is pretty small and i just cut out a piece a little bit oversized for what i needed so that i could trim the excess flush with the edge after i got it on and then i very carefully applied it to the top and then i could trim the excess around the edge with a router using a flush cutting bit that has a bearing on it the bearing rides along the edge of the table and the blade cuts the veneer flush with the edge i did have to stop every once in a while and clean off some excess veneer that was sticking to the bit and then i cut some strips out for the edge and you can buy pre-cut edge banding that you actually apply with an iron the iron heats up the adhesive and it sticks but the edge banding that i had wasn't big enough for this and also it was a slightly different color than the veneer on top so so cutting these strips from the same sheet worked out better in the end you foreign next it was time to make a little veneer patch for this spot where the veneer is missing in the bottom corner and i started just by tracing the shape that i needed just to get a basic idea and then i cut that shape out of a piece of veneer but i cut it a little bit larger to give me some wiggle room and i brought it back to the nightstand and then positioned it so that it overhanged the edges a bit and just traced around it into the original veneer and removed any of that excess and then i had a nice fit there was a little divot in it that i had to fill first before i glued on the veneer so that i had a nice flat surface to glue to so i just filled that with some epoxy putty and once it dried i sanded it flat and then i could glue in the veneer and i used super glue for this i didn't use wood glue because the surface i was gluing to looked like it was particle board and there was all sorts of stuff on it already i didn't know if wood glue would stick so super glue seemed like a better choice i applied some water to the vineyard to see how well or how badly the new veneer matched the old and as you can see the new veneer is quite a bit lighter and the old veneer seems to have more of an orangey reddish color to it so i knew that i would need to adjust the color on the veneer but first i wanted to fill the grain with some wood filler this is a water-based wood filler and i'm doing this because walnut usually has visible pores in the wood and at the factory when this nightstand was made the walnut veneer on it would have had those pores filled either with grain filler or maybe just lots of layers of finish on it so if i don't fill the pores on the new piece of veneer it will stick out because you'll see the little holes in the veneer they'll reflect the light back to your eye so to help blend it in more i just filled those pores with this wood filler let it dry and then just sanded off any excess so that was step one and then i got some of this orange dye and mixed it in with some water and just applied that to the new veneer took me a while and this kind of stuff involves a lot of trial and error at least for me so i just apply some dye and then let it dry and see how it looks and apply more if it needs it or try to remove some if it is too much and i made sure to make my final judgment from this angle looking down on it because this will be down on the floor and this bottom corner is going to be really close to the floor and 90 percent of people are going to be viewing it from a distance and looking down on it so that's just something to keep in mind when you're doing when you're trying to blend things in like this try to remember the environment that it's going to be living in and that it's going to be viewed in and i eventually got it to a place that i thought looked pretty good and then i had to adjust the color of the veneer on the top here i'm wetting it down with some water and you can see the new walnut veneer is paler and more brown looking than the old walnut veneer on the rest of the piece the old walnut veneer has kind of that orangey yellowish look that i see a lot on old walnut pieces so i knew i wanted to add some of that orangey color to the top to start with so i mixed up some more stain with the dies this time i used a combination of orange amber and medium brown so i applied the first coat and i like the direction it was going in but it was still quite a bit darker than the rest of the piece so i decided to add that same stain to the entire piece and i know from reading the comments on my videos that there are a lot of people out there who really don't like any orange or red or yellow color in their wood furniture and the trend these days seems to be towards really pale washed out wood colors kind of like a piece of driftwood and i can see the appeal to that but i still tend to lean more towards the warmer reddish orangey color with the exception of red oak orange like for instance 80s kitchen cabinets or 1980s oak entertainment center that you see all the time in thrift stores i'm not a fan of that so much but with walnut i like some rng redness in there so just be warned if you don't like that kind of thing there's going to be a lot of orange in this one i let that all dry and i felt like the top still could have used more orange so i took some straight orange stain just some water with the orange dye and apply that to the top over the first stain so like i said this is going to be pretty orange heavy and i understand that a lot of people won't like that but i had fun with it and the end result has a nice orangey glow to it after i put the stain on then i worked on this other veneer chip on the other side and this one was really small so i didn't want to bother cutting a piece of veneer for it so instead i used these hard fill sticks and basically you just heat it up and drip some of the hot fill into whatever you're trying to repair and i'm using a special tool here to heat it up but you could probably use anything like a hot soldering iron would probably work and once it cooled then i just scraped off any excess and again i'm using a special tool but you could probably figure out some other kind of a tool to use for this step and if you want to get extra fancy you can apply some fake green lines to help blend it in a little more and then it was time for the top coat and in this case i used a satin clear lacquer and it looks extra orange now but once the clear coat goes on it will bring out a little bit more of the brown and it won't look quite so orange but it'll still be kind of orangy which i kind of like i know it's probably too much orange for a lot of people but i like it and then i went to put the back panel back on and realize that i have to do something about the color on that because now that doesn't match the rest of the finish and the color on this was just kind of a pale brownish tan thing so i needed to make it a little more orangey red and darker so i just brushed on some candlelight gel stain and i used the foam brush to gently brush back and forth on it as it dried to remove some excess but not all of it i wanted to leave most of it on there so i never actually wiped off the excess with a paper towel or anything i just kept going over it back and forth as it got tacky until it was a color that i liked and then i let it dry and sprayed that with some clear lacquer to seal it in and the last step was to nail the back panel back on and here it is all finished thanks for watching

Channel: Dashner Design & Restoration

Views: 74,487

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Id: E3Tc-60lH9s

Length: 21min 12sec (1272 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 15 2022