What Finish Should I Use? | Woodworking Beginner Tips

all right i'm not gonna bury the lead i hate finishing okay well maybe not hate but i don't enjoy it if anything i tolerate it but it is one of the topics that i get asked about most often so i figured rather than answering a bunch of emails individually i'd just make this video so before we get into it a couple key things to remember one i'm not an expert so anything i say here shouldn't be taken as definitive or the final word instead i'm somebody probably like you who just wants a finish that's relatively easy to apply and i'll do what i need it to do two there are way too many finishes to possibly cover so instead of hitting everything which i couldn't do i'm gonna focus on two types of finish and these are what i use 99 of the time and i'm sure that's what everybody does you kind of find what works and stick with it and three there are way too many variables to possibly hit everything specific to every person so again these are just recommendations and what i've gravitated towards during my woodworking career okay all that said the first step in finishing regardless of what product you want to use is sanding and i know that's not what you came here for so if you want to skip this you can just fast forward to this time and you'll get right into finishing but my number one single biggest tip when it comes to sanding is this don't rush whenever you have a large panel to sand people's tendency is to want to go like this but in reality you should be going like this i like to do overlapping passes alternating between going lengthwise and then going widthwise for however many passes it takes until i'm done basically imagine you're mowing a lawn you wouldn't push the mower in a dead sprint in a random pattern you'd go back and forth i guess you'd probably only go lengthwise and not width-wise and certainly you wouldn't make several passes look the point is i have fake grass anyway so slow passes and you're going to start with 60 or 80 grit and this is where it's going to take you the longest you might want to periodically check by drawing some pencil marks on your panel and taking another pass and just keep doing this until everything is nice and level then we'll move on to 120 grit 150 grit 180 grit and finally 220 grit and that's where i'll usually stop well i take that back for spots that won't get touched i'm going to stop at 180 or even 150. so for example take something like this dresser i'm going to sand the top and the drawer faces and the sides to 220 and everything else to 180 except things like the underside of the bottom and the underside of the top i'll call 150 good enough okay now i know sanding is boring but just a couple last things because i think these might really help you in addition to sanding in a logical pattern don't push overly hard and don't tilt your sander i know it can be really tempting when you feel a high spot to want to dig in and kind of grind away but don't and that's actually one of the things that i've come to really like about this sander the mirka at first i didn't like the fact that you have to depress the paddle to make it run i was used to my old sander which had a switch that you didn't need to hold but over time i've come to really like it because it almost forces me into using good technique since the pressure i'm putting down is centered over the sanding pad okay this is the last thing plywood so all of the same stuff applies except that usually i'll start with 180 and then go up to 220 or sometimes i'll just start and stop with 220. basically you just want to be careful not to sand through the veneer okay now we can get on to finishing so like i said at the top of the video there are way too many to cover shellac varnish lacquer polyurethanes water-based oil-based and then within those they're endless brands but at its most simple you really have two types penetrating finishes and surface finishes and for the most part they are pretty much exactly what they sound like a penetrating finish is going to soak more deeply into the wood forming a seal and leave a much thinner surface coat whereas a surface finish while it's still going to penetrate the wood a bit is going to build up a much thicker film on the surface with repeated applications so what are the drawbacks and benefits of this actually before we go any deeper let's narrow the field so from this point forward i'm only going to be talking about the two types of finish that i use on 99 of my projects and those are simple finish which is a penetrating oil with a wax top coat and pretty much any water-based polyurethane that's readily available to me now in full disclosure i'm probably biased because simplefinish is a maker brand product and ben mike and i started maker brand that said don't get it backwards i don't like simple finish because it's what i made but rather i made it because it's what i like okay so generally speaking a penetrating oil is going to have a much more natural look and feel and i know people use the term stain and finish kind of interchangeably but really what it's doing is enhancing the wood in fact you can usually just wipe some water on a piece of wood and that'll show you about the color that you can expect from a penetrating finish minus any hue another benefit is it's easier to refinish if needed if you get let's say a scratch a year down the road you can sand the spot feathering it out wipe on a couple coats and it's good as new whereas with a polyurethane it's going to be a lot harder to fix that spot that said the opposite side of that coin is polyurethane is generally a bit more durable so you're less likely to get that scratch or maybe not less likely but it's just going to take a little bit more so i guess you can kind of think of them on an inverse scale the more durable a finish the harder it is to touch up and vice versa and the last major benefit that i'll touch on and this is subjective is that i think oils are just a little bit easier to apply and that leads to better and more consistent results for most people now some of the other benefits with polyurethane are going to be at least for what i use it's cheaper by volume and it changes the color of the wood less if that's the result that you're going for which i guess takes us into the next topic actually applying things so let's do that and then i'm going to talk about when and why i choose different finishes and hopefully with all of that information you'll be able to pick what's right for you for penetrating oils like simple finish i always apply them by hand wiping them on with either an old t-shirt or blue shop towels and the exact timing is going to vary based on your environment temperature humidity etc but generally speaking i wipe on a coat pretty liberally let it soak in for about 20 minutes then come back and wipe on another coat wait another 20 minutes or so and then wipe off any excess oil that hasn't absorbed into the wood using some blue shop towels then at the very least the next day i'm going to wipe on another coat and again after about 20 minutes wipe off any excess oil now you'll find that as you do this the wood is gonna soak up less and less finish and the more coats that you put on the deeper the luster you'll get so at the most i'm gonna do two coats on day one one code on day two and then stop there if i'm happy but if i want more i'll do another code on day four and then another code on day seven and i've never done more than that i would say the most common for me is three coats everywhere and a fourth coat on really touchable areas tabletops drawer fronts that kind of stuff so that kind of takes us to another benefit slash drawback between the two in my opinion wipe on oil finishes are less work but there's more downtime whereas a poly is going to be more labor but there's very little down time so you could get on several coats in a single day if you wanted now if you're looking for something to do during that downtime i recommend getting new glasses and if you're getting new glasses i recommend warby parker okay now seriously before you fast forward yes this is a sponsorship we all know how this works but seriously i have been using warby parker and recommending them to friends since way before i ever uploaded my first youtube video so here's how it works you go online take a quiz and they're gonna suggest a bunch of frames then you pick your five favorites and they'll send them to you at home to try on and it ships for free they're in back and there's no obligation to buy so there's literally nothing to lose now the reason that i think it's important is because the purpose of a pair of glasses in addition to the obvious of helping you to see shouldn't be to look good on their own it should be to make you look good and something that i recently heard is that you should pick a pair of glasses that contrasts your face shape so if you have a more angular face you'd go with a rounder pair of glasses and if you have a rounder face get something more angular now i honestly can't tell what kind of face i have i feel like i'm in between so i opted for pairs that were round square and sort of in between and then i can make the decision once i see them on me and once i do glasses start at only 95 dollars including the prescription lenses warby parker is committed to providing exceptional vision care online and in stores offering eyeglasses sunglasses eye exams and contact lenses so if you're in the market for any i highly recommend checking out warby parker just go to warbyparker.com four eyes or better yet click the link in the description okay now let's get back to talking about finishes now with water-based poly you can wipe or brush it on but i prefer to spray if you aren't spraying though the few times that i've brushed it on i've used foam brushes putting on several light coats and making sure to brush very lightly with the grain of the wood and whether you wipe it on or spray it on if this is your first time know this you're gonna think that you messed it up when you put on your first coat it's gonna look a little bit blotchy and feel rough but that's fine that's how the first coat goes on and that's because of those several light passes and due to the fact that it raises the grain of your wood now again dry times depend on the environment but spraying or wiping you can usually re-coat within a matter of tens of minutes and regardless of the application process the general approach is going to be the same so i'm going to spray from here on in so you put on your first coat and it's going to look and feel like trash but don't panic and i like to get two coats on if i'm brushing or three coats if i'm spraying since they're usually a little bit lighter and then i'm going to wait for it to dry and then very lightly sand with 320 grit sandpaper i'm just barely putting any pressure down just kind of gliding it along the surface and that's going to knock back the raised grain and you should see a sort of white powder dust film come off so we'll sand it everywhere then i'm just going to use my hands to wipe off the powder as best as i can and do another coat and i'm going to do the same thing sanding between coats to get a total of five to seven coats on and when i've got my last coat on i'm gonna take a brown paper bag and rub out the surface to get rid of any little dust nibs that might have gotten to the finish and that's basically it so like i said these two finishes account for 99 of the finishing that i do so the next question is when and how do i decide to use polyurethane versus simple finish so here's how now there's no particular order to how i think about these things but since i can't simultaneously talk about all of them let's start with plywood versus hardwood if it's a plywood piece with exposed plywood edges like for example this giant thing that i built at my parents house i'm gonna go with polyurethane and there are two main reasons first i actually prefer the plasticy feeling that the polyurethane leaves when it's on plywood edges and second i prefer the color that polyurethane leaves on the plywood edges which is almost no color change at all whereas oil especially depending on what the cores of your plywood are made from is gonna darken things and probably not very uniformly now if it's a plywood piece where i'm gonna be covering the plywood edges i'm going to make my decision based on other factors so the next one that we'll talk about is color so we touched on this a bit already but generally speaking i've got three different tones that i'm shooting for on any given piece dark medium or light and the two species of woods that i find myself gravitating towards the most recently are walnut and beech so if i want a darkish tone i'm most likely going to go with something like walnut and i'm almost always going to use oil over polyurethane for that and that's because it's going to be a bit darker and just has a higher end look and feel if i'm going for a medium warm tone i'm usually going to go with a combination of beech and oil and you can substitute beech for any number of species but this gives me that sort of warm goldeny color that's probably my favorite at the moment now if i want a really light look i'm going to choose beach again you can sub that out for other species and polyurethane and this will leave the wood much more bare looking take this table and chair for example these are both beach and i took these pictures one after another in the same lighting and in the same spot and you can see here when you start looking at finished pieces the difference can become pretty pronounced the next factor that i'm going to think about is how this piece is going to be used and what kind of access i'll have to it now both of these finishes can be extremely durable i have pieces in my house that are many years old and have an oil finish that i've never retouched and they're holding up great that said as we talked about before polyurethane is the more durable so if it's a piece that i know is going to get a lot of abuse and i'm giving it away to somebody that's far away so i'm never going to have access to it and i know that it's not likely to get any kind of maintenance i'm probably going to use polyurethane but if it's a higher end piece that'll only get normal wear or something that people don't interact with a lot like a media console or if it's something that i could imagine them refinishing or touching up if needed after say five years or if it's something that i'm keeping at my house if any of those things are true i'm gonna lean towards oil and i think that about covers it you know i'm sitting here and i'm watching this back and i want to give some more clear direction so i guess to make it more clear what i would base choosing a finish off of would be two things one what you like the finished look of and two what you enjoy using so here's why i kind of had that epiphany so i'm sitting here at my dining table and this piece is a few years old and it has a polyurethane finish and you see this stain right here this is where my kids used slime on the table and there's a lot of other like little scratches and markers and all kinds of stuff on it basically it it's something that gets a lot of use and it takes a lot of abuse so at the time that i built this i was thinking it's going to get a lot of abuse therefore i need to use a durable finish i use the polyurethane and here we are a few years later and it's pretty beat up basically it didn't matter what finish i used on it and i guess that's kind of the point is it it really doesn't matter what finish you use on it i don't care how strong it is if it's a piece that's going to get abused a lot or used a lot it's going to start to show some wear and the opposite of that is true if it's a piece that's just gonna sit in a corner that's never gonna get touched you could probably put the worst finish in the world on it and it's gonna stay relatively fine it's just sitting there maybe it's getting some dust on it or something so i guess hopefully that kind of illustrates the point i mean now i'm in a situation with this table where i'm gonna have to refinish it no matter what eventually you know probably once the kids are a little bit older no point in doing it now but it's gonna be a lot harder to refinish it now than if i had just used a penetrating oil um so hopefully that lesson that i had to learn helps you think about things and choose what's right for you again just choose what you like the color of and what you like working with i think that's the best advice that i can give okay let's go back to the video and for the one percent of the time that i don't use either of these finishes it's usually when i'm going for something that's really deep black in color and so i'll go with a black polyurethane okay so we covered a lot but we're barely scratching the surface of talking about sanding and finishing but i feel like this is the 20 or so that covers 99 of my needs so hopefully it gave you some good information and something to think about so you can make that decision for yourself on your projects all right i'll see you in the next one

Channel: Foureyes Furniture

Views: 288,208

Keywords: how to finish wood, woodfinish, finishing wood, poly, polyurethane, polyurethane finish, oil finish, penetrating oil finish, wood finish, beginner woodworking tips, woodworking tips, finishing tips, what finish, Woodworking, woodwork, wood working, DIY, how to, DIY Woodworking

Id: W8jp3tweJes

Length: 16min 49sec (1009 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 07 2021