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This is the penultimate task: applying a couple of nice, smooth coats of polyurethane to the top. One of the most frustrating parts of this job is that the actual application of a layer takes maybe fifteen minutes: most of the actual process is in waiting 24 hours for the layer to dry before you can move on to the next task.
I
have no idea what went wrong, but it did. Somewhere between the applications
of the second and third layers of polyurethane, I found that the surface just
wasn't as smooth as I'd wanted it to be. The photo at left, exploiting the reflections
of my shop's overhead lights, shows what I'm talking about.
I have no real idea what went wrong, but it seems as though the polyurethane I was using may have started to gel in the can, so it didn't spread as evenly as it should, and I should have diluted it a bit with paint thinner as well.
Sanding the stuff down just made it worse. I tried sanding with fine grit, then with coarser grit to break the surface down more efficiently... and then I wound up with sandpaper-created gouges in the finish...
I gave up. This finish was finished, I decided. There was nothing for it but taking the whole thing off and starting over. I removed the polyurethane with paint stripper: first Safest Stripper with wax paper covering, followed with Methylene Chloride. This did the trick, as usual.
But I took my time with this because the disaster was, well, pretty dispiriting. I'd screwed up, and there'd been a good chance that the top could have been ruined. So the re-stripping of the top went very slowly.
So, here we are again. A nice, clean top, only mildly discolored, ready for a nice fresh application of stain and finish. And about a week and a half's worth of work has been evaporated. The veneer's probably 0.01" thinner, too.
I even removed the bits of wood filler in the repair areas, because taking off the crummy finish required it. The filler didn't stain properly, anyway. I'm thinking of two possibilities for those areas. The first is to order some nice thick brown wax. The second is to mix the gel stain in with the filler and match the color before filling the damage.
But as the the polyurethane... well, this time, I'm not using the thick stuff I brushed on before. I'm using wipe-on poly for the first coat, at least; and if I have to use the thick stuff, I'm thinning it severely.
At
right, you can see what the first coat of wipe-on polyurethane loks like...
sorta. The photo looks nice, but up close and in person, a single coat of wipe-on
polyurethane doesn't look like much. It looks more like a very, very light glaze
that may or may not be on the actual wood.
It's nice to wipe the stuff on, because it looks great when it's wet, and you can apply it without worrying about brush strokes or bubbling in the finish. And because the wipe-on poly takes only two hours to dry, I applied three coats during Labor Day.
The next day, I diluted the regular glossy poly severely, and applied it with a nice, wide foam brush. It seemed to go OK. Here's what I got:
The day after that, I sanded that layer down with 400-grit sandpaper; there was some resistance, and somehow, the sanding left some light scratches. Another application of wipe-on didn't cover that entirely...
... so I put on a last layer of the regular-but-diluted polyurethane. Come today, after a nice 24 hours of drying and crystallizing and getting nice'n'hard, this was the result. Notice how clear the reflections are.
I've moved the thing to my room (which, as you can tell from the background in the photo, also needs a lot of work), and apart from needing two screws for the drawer hardware, this project is done.
Have another look at the progress.
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| Original Chest of drawers, June 2006 |
Final Chest of Drawers, |
Final Chest of Drawers, |
Copyright 2000-6 Brian Siano
(unless otherwise noted)