Wood Filler & Putty for Furniture Repair | Woodworking How to

welcome back to our workshop there's a lot of confusion out there about wood fillers and wood putty for woodworking and if you're working on furniture repairs it gets even more complex i'm going to walk you through all the products that i use in my furniture repair business so you'll understand the right tool for the job you're working on as a furniture repair business we're opening the doors to our workshop to show you the tools and techniques to repair furniture what i need to do is take that apart repair it and put it back together so i can get this chair in working order we give you tips to make your repair projects easier let's get into the workshop and start fixing furniture there are a lot of different products on the market to help woodworkers fill flaws in woodwork and in finished pieces as well here i've got a real mix of them and the marketing unfortunately is a little bit misleading a little bit confusing let me walk you through each of these so you can understand what they are and what they're used for let me show you a close-up of each of these so you can see what they are i'm going to focus my camera in close so i think the background is going to go blurry this is a dot product called wood patch this is an elmer's product and it's labeled as a wood filler this is a minwax product and this is a wood putty this is quick wood and this is labeled as an epoxy putty then we get into some of the sticks this is a minwax stick this is described as a filler this is an older product i have you can see here this is called a putty pencil and in french is crayon here i've got one that's the label is worn off but it's a putty stick filler so there's a lot of terminology here that's blending across them this is a wax stick and here i've got some mohawk burn-in sticks so what do you use for what job well let's separate these into some categories these products are meant for two really different things one of them is bare wood where you're doing some woodworking and you have some flaws or you've got a finished piece that has a finish on it so when you've got wood filler here and here even though this is called wood patch these are products that i would use on bare wood and that is you put them on the wood you sand it down you apply your stain your finish and you're disguising a flaw in the bare wood these products are not intended for that what we've got here is a wood putty and a putty is something that if you look up in the dictionary it's something that's malleable and when you let it sit it will harden to a certain degree so this wood putty is good for fixing flaws and you can actually take different colors i've got three different colors here and blend them together to get the color that you're looking for to dial it right in the quick wood is another putty this is an epoxy putty and the difference between these two is while this is good for nail holes and scratches it can't hold structure uh quick wood can do that so if you've got the outside corner of something where you've got a chunk missing or maybe a carving quick wood is good for that because it will when it dries be as hard as wood and what it is is a tube of two different mixtures so you slice off a section that you want you work it all together into one and this will dry in about 30 minutes and it will cure in about 60 minutes it's a really handy product to have so i keep that in my repair kit for service calls if we take the putties and set them aside what we're left here is what i consider wax sticks some of them are called pencils some of them are called crayons and i'll give you an example of how this works on a repair project i did this one i think is going to give me a good match i can touch it up after as well and it's just a matter of rubbing it onto the void back and forth and working it into that spot i want to do is take a rag [Music] and just buff off what's there [Music] it seems like there's a bit of glue or something here maybe that was the tape from the previous repair [Music] yeah there's some glue dried glue there [Music] so this is considered a soft wax here they call it a filler it's a stick here it's called a fill here it's called a putty pencil really these are soft waxes that get worked into a flaw these two here are much different these you need to use heat to melt the wax and if you look at a kit like this you've got a number of different colors that you can use and let me show you an example of why you want many different colors when you're doing a repair i'm working on a wheel here where i've repaired it and there's a couple of cracks there's one here here and here and i need to disguise those cracks so i'm using burn-in sticks these are hard wax sticks and you use heat i'm using a soldering iron here and what i'm going to do is melt those in now frequently you've got all these different colors you can buy packs and packs of these to get a rainbow but not one color is going to work because of the variation in wood so i'm going to start with this dark one and see how it works and what i can do is lighten it up with this one if i need to because these melt to a liquid state it's easy to blend the color just like mixing paints the soldering iron tip is a point and what i do is put the tip down and melt the wax on it and you can see here how quickly the wax melts it just turns into a liquid so what i do is just put the point down and that directs the flow of the liquid and i could just drag that across there just like that this dries in about 30 seconds and you just need to take a plastic card this is just an old room key card and you need to drag that across and what you're doing is leveling out the wax what i like to do is just gently pull it across first to get the high points off and then i go across the grain and scrape the surface if you've got a big chunk like this you don't want to push that right off because it will break you want to gently wear that down you don't want to pull it out of the groove so once you've got it leveled out again just rub it across and then what you can do is inspect the area and see how your color matches so it's looking to me slightly red so i'm going to get a little bit of brown so the color i was using was a heartwood cherry and this one is called a true brown so what i'm going to do is put the point back down into that groove you can see here i i'm able to very easily reactivate that wax and i'm going to put a little bit of the true brown in there and just knock down that red color a little bit okay let that dry i'll try it again i've got a bit of residue coming off over here okay so that's not looking too bad it's a little bit darker than the surrounding wood but you can see here i've got some natural grain that's working that way anyway so i'm happy with that i'll just buff it a little bit and we're good to go now that i've gotten into these harder waxes i rarely use the softer waxes in fact i carry this in my repair kit when i do service calls it allows me to get the right color tone but also in larger fills i can get variation in color that mimics the grain pattern in the wood so i find this as a much better product than the softer ones i've got one more demonstration for you and that's using wood filler i was doing a repair on a chair where the pieces didn't come together well so i had to sand them down and i was down to bare wood i used that opportunity to put in some wood filler because i needed to stain the area anyway let me show you how that's done so this is where i did the glue up it matched really well here but there's a bit of a height difference here so i need to smooth that out but as i'm looking closer now i can actually see there used to be a break here and that was repaired and there used to be a break here and that was repaired so this whole chair must have been broken at some point and someone had put it back together unfortunately when they repaired this piece up here they didn't do a very good job of aligning it so i have to even that out and then we'll stain it and then i need to test the finish to see what finish needs to go on top of this this section down here is slightly higher than this section so the best tool for the job to level that out is to use a spoke shave you could use a chisel with it but a spokeshave will give you a much smoother profile so it's probably going to take me down to about here i'm going to have some bare wood to deal with so it's actually not that far so that's not too bad a few more passes just to even it out okay that's good now some 120 grit sandpaper and get this all smooth [Music] i'll just work it in here leave it a little bit proud and then once it's dried come back and sand it and then i can touch it up with a stain [Music] i sprayed on three coats of lacquer and in between sanded it with a 400 grit paper of these three pieces it was the bottom one that was broken the tenons were broken off at both end now this is rock solid chair and the break across here and here is concealed and you can just barely see a couple old breaks here this one is a larger scar so i'll touch that up before i'm done here here on the back of the chair this was broken here and here and you can see it's much better repair than the previous one here and these two spots i rarely use a wood filler on something that is stained and finished it's more common that i use it on painted trim or even painted cabinets let me show you an example i'm using a dot filler here this is water-based and what i'm doing is just working it into that crack across if you pull this way you'll pull into the crack but if you go across the crack it forces the filler in there do the same thing up here i'm just going to add a big gob and this is just like doing drywall mud now the difference here is i'm going to leave this high and then sand it down normally with drywall mud you want to go on thin coats you see if i pull that it's just pulling another divot in my opinion this is where wood filler is really useful you're painting a surface so you're really just concerned about the texture you don't need to worry about matching colors when you put a primer on you put some paint on that claw just disappears so this is the power of wood filler i hope you found these examples useful i'll provide a link to some of these products in the video description below as well as our patreon link our patreons are helping us with our video production work to make videos like this possible for you their names are over here thank you patreons for making this possible if you'd like to subscribe to our channel you can click over here click on the bell icon and you get notified every time we publish a video please give this a thumbs up to let youtube know this is a quality video and they'll promote it to more people so they can learn about wood fillers and wood putty thanks for watching fixing furniture [Music] you

Channel: Fixing Furniture

Views: 395,546

Keywords: furniture repair, woodworking, wood filler, wood putty, filler stick, wood patch, fill pencil, fill crayon, wood repair, burn-in stick, Mohawk Finishes, Minwax, Elmer's, Liberon, Sheffield, Quick Wood, DAP

Id: d9KC36yZdZs

Length: 15min 0sec (900 seconds)

Published: Sat Jan 30 2021