Polyurethane vs Lacquer vs Shellac: Pick Your Wood Finish

okay we're gonna be talking about three finishes that span the test of time or history one of them being shellac and all-natural product another being lacquer very common in the professional space and a third one being polyurethane well you might have heard of and a very common finisher of today's era we're gonna talk through which one to use at each circumstance which one you might want to use on your upcoming wood finishing project as always if you like what you're seeing please hit that like button and subscribe so you can follow along on our future videos okay let's go ahead and get to it today we're going to take a look at three different finishes that are somewhat similar but really we're going to find as we delve into it that they're significantly different and can be used in different ways for different results and I'm going to start and move from the oldest finish historically oldest finish to the historically newest finish and the oldest one is this shellac shellac is made by insects is the secretion of the lac bug which lives in certain trees in southern Asia and India and they secrete this fluid and this fluid is harvested and then it is dried and then the dried shellac is cracked and crumbled into a flaky sort of solid you then mix this these flakes with the solvent for shellac which is denatured alcohol now denatured alcohol is alcohol that you could drink but they've made it poisonous so that people don't drink it so it's the same alcohol just as a poison add to it and it's called denatured alcohol it's inexpensive as it's somewhat somewhat obnoxious in fumes but not real bad it's interesting to know that nature is required to make this shellac this is a 116 ounces of shellac flakes and it took about a million and a half lakh bugs to make this one pound of shellac so there's a lot of nature going on here to make it but it's very natural there's nothing man-made about it it was the go to furniture finish from starting in about 1820 and it was the go to finish until about 1920 a hundred years virtually all the furniture made in Europe and the United States were finished with shellac then nitrile nitrocellulose lacquer was invented discovered as a result of World War one and it became the go-to finish and in fact in those days they thought that shellac was dead and would never be used again because varnish I mean I'm sorry lacquer seemed like the perfect finish but then in the 1940s some chemists came up with polyurethane and polyurethane will see has some real advantages over these other two finishes and it has one or two detrimental characteristics and we'll talk about all that so now let's talk about we've seen sort of the history of it let's talk about the characteristics shellac like I said you mix these flakes with denatured alcohol and you the quantity is gives you a different characteristic in the finish that is the amount of the solid that you add to a given amount of denatured alcohol determines some of the characteristics of the finish it can be either sprayed on or brushed on if you brush on jhalak it's not like painting where you take a brush and go back and forth the shellac sort of dries pretty quickly and so you need to keep your brush moving in the direction of the wet edge you don't want to go back he'll always want to go forward it's because if you do go go back and then forward you end up dragging some partially cured and dried shellac into the newly weds finish and it doesn't give you an attractive finish so putting it on requires a bit of skill and some getting used to I would say it's more you have to get used to it then it's a real high skill endeavor now lacquer you can also spray on shellac and to spray it on in the modern sprayer you know HL VP sprayer you just mix it and to the right consistency because this dissolves completely in the denatured alcohol and then you can spray it it sprays very well it does not dry exceedingly rapidly but it dries fast enough that the spray process works and you don't get a bunch of settling of dirt and dust and so forth into the finish lacquer the reason lacquer is so wonderful in the furniture business is how quickly it goes on the furniture business sprays the lacquer with professional sprayers HVLP would work fine for the home user and you mix it with lacquer thinner to the proper consistency to get the proper viscosity to go through the sprayer and a demise correctly coming out of the sprayer the thing about lacquer is though you have to spray it in an even pattern and you have to move rather rapidly the lacquer will basically dry as soon as it hits the surface and so there is definitely some learning curve to get used to so that you don't end up with orange peel like finish in the lacquer so it takes a good sprayer and it takes some practice to get used to to overcome some of that these sprayers can be a bit pricey they also make spray cans of lacquer which you can buy at the big-box home goods store and you can spray it on with having any of the expensive equipment the problem is that the lacquer per ounce this in those spray cans is fairly expensive compared to buying what you would put into your own sprayer so you have an initial cost of buying the spraying equipment but then it's cheaper use the lacquer you also can can buy a brush on lacquer and you'll notice there's a paint brush on the label here with a guy's hand this is a brushing lacquer you can brush lacquer on the problem with brushing it on is you have to keep a wet edge and you really have to keep a wet edge because it dries very rapidly so if you're trying to do a very large surface even the cert top something the area of this table saw top surface would be difficult to do with a brushing lacquer because it would dry so quickly that as you as you got back to where you were on the last pass it could very well have dried to the point where there's a seam and a line now polyurethane is you do not typically spray polyurethane on it doesn't spray particularly well you generally brush it on or wipe it on the most difficult thing about polyurethane is learning the technique to get a good looking finish you don't want to leave a lot of brush marks behind so you have to use a high quality brush with very fine bristles and you have to put it on delicately and without a lot of pressure and without a lot of repeated brushing as far as durability is concerned the shellac is the least durable it's most susceptible to water and heat to being damaged by for instance if you have a glass of water with ice in it and you set it down on a shellac surface it will leave a white ring and that white ring will be there so you have to use coasters for instance and you can't put anything hot on shellac lacquer is a more durable finish than shellacked it's I would say a medium durability again you don't want to set hot things on to lacquer and you don't really want to get it have water sitting on it for long periods of time and you particularly don't want to have an alcoholic drink spill on it and stay there because the alcohol will react with by far the most durable of these three finishes is the polyurethane it's a very modern finish in that it is designed to be durable now let's talk about some of the character and putting it on as I said earlier is a little bit it takes some technique but it goes on reasonably well this one you're smelling denatured alcohol and you clean your brushes in denatured alcohol this one you actually need respiratory equipment to keep from breathing the lacquer and it is a safety hazard it's especially flammable and you wouldn't want to have it in an enclosed space with say a water heater with a pilot light or a furnace with a pilot light because you get a large enough buildup of the fumes that it can become explosive and actually blow up polyurethane is an oil-based finish and it does smell like an oil-based finish but it's not so bad that it's not toxic enough that you would need to use respiratory equipment if you're going to use the polyurethane so to sum up the shellac has been around for a long time it's inexpensive it's fairly easy to put on but its durability is really not up to modern finish lacquer is very quick to put on hence it is used a lot in the furniture industry it dries very quickly that's both a benefit and a drawback if you're not good putting it on so you have to have a good technique to put lacquer on and lacquer is dangerous it's dangerous from a toxic fume perspective and it's explosive so you have to be very careful and work in ventilated spaces away from open flames polyurethane is by far the most durable it's pretty easy to put on it dries relatively quickly and you can brush it on or wipe it on so we hope you enjoyed the content that we've given you today please hit the like button and please subscribe so that you can be you can be notified of future content that we put out you

Channel: SawsHub DIY Woodworking Tips

Views: 65,051

Keywords: Polyurethane vs Lacquer vs Shellac, polyurethane wood finish, polyurethane vs lacquer, polyurethane wood finish spray, lacquer finish on wood, lacquer vs polyurethane, shellac wood finish, shellac vs polyurethane, polyurethane, lacquer, shellac, wood finish, woodworking for beginners, woodworking furniture projects, woodworking tips, how to finish wood

Id: 6u2dPx4zAcE

Length: 11min 48sec (708 seconds)

Published: Sat Jun 27 2020