Woodworking Magazine Weblog

Yesterday I finished up work on the dry sink that is the cover project for the Spring 2009 issue of Woodworking Magazine (Issue 13). As always, the finishing part of the project was as much an adventure as designing and building it.

The project is made from Eastern white pine, so we knew that coloring it with a pigment or dye would result in blotching. My first gut feeling was to paint the thing – I've seen a lot of painted dry sinks. But paint would hide all the nice wood selection and joinery, so we opted to first try something else.

First we experimented with tea stains (yes, made from tea) and made some sample boards. Then we added some orange dye to the tea. Then we switched gears and tried adding dye to an oil/varnish blend. No dice.

So we fell back on our pumpkin pine finish from a few issues ago. It involves a stain controller, a maple stain and shellac. The test boards looked good, so on Monday I added the stain controller in the early morning. That evening I added the maple stain. Yuck.

The result looked good in places and blotchy in others. The stain controller didn't seem to work consistently over the entire piece.

So Senior Editor Glen D. Huey brought in a can of Olde Century Colors "Yankee Blue." I swallowed hard (being a cracker-loving Southerner) and applied two coats. Now I'm happy.

The experience reminded me of a column I wrote for our Autumn 2006 issue, which discussed the role of paint in furniture-making. So I thought this would be a good time to reprint it here.

— Christopher Schwarz

“Many of the things I make are not treated in any way afterwards, because
nothing that I can put on them will enhance the beauty of the natural wood.”

— James Krenov, "A Cabinetmaker’s Notebook” (Linden)

The second Welsh stick chair I ever built was made using both traditional methods and traditional materials. That meant elm for the seat, white oak for the legs and the arm bow, and ash for the spindles.

My plan was to color the chair with a brown stain that would visually tie these three species together. So after carefully preparing all my parts, making a few test boards using stains and hues that I was familiar with, I colored the chair one Saturday afternoon.

When the stain dried, the chair didn’t look like I had hoped. But I told myself to be patient; a topcoat of clear finish can change the final appearance of a finishing job. And I was right; the chair looked even worse with a topcoat.

Something about the stain color I chose, the wood I picked for the chair or my finishing technique made these three species together look like a visual jumble. The coloring was so inconsistent that my eye would jump around the chair, never sure what was important or where to look next.

So I pored over my books on chairmaking and then slept on the problem. By morning, I knew the answer: Paint the thing. Lots of early furniture was painted, especially Windsor-style chairs that used a variety of species in their construction.

But there was a problem here. A mental problem. Like most woodworkers, painting a piece of furniture was something of a last resort in my head. We woodworkers are supposed to celebrate the grain of the wood and finish it to enhance its swirls and swoops. A coat of paint on furniture is seen as evidence that something is amiss. Maybe we used inferior materials. Perhaps we chose our materials so poorly that the grain selection is ugly. Maybe our joinery is gappy. Or we are incapable of preparing a surface for a stain and topcoat. Or we simply cannot finish.

I hate stripping finish, so I decided to give the paint a try. I purchased a quart of dark Windsor green and some primer. I set to work covering up my misdeeds and pondering where I could stash this chair in my house so my woodworking friends would never see it.

After two coats, the chair looked radically different. Details that had been obscured by the grain or stain color jumped out in sharp relief. During construction, I had carved a small gutter around the perimeter of the seat that – when painted – appeared as a perfect dark line rimming the work. I had spent an hour planing and filing a nice curved chamfer on three edges of the crest rail at the top of the chair. Those chamfers now shined, no longer shying away from attention. And a chamfer on the swooping arm bow looked clearly tied to the chamfers on the crest rail.

But there was more. When I stood back a few steps I could really and truly see the chair. It was like a graphic drawing of a chair. It looked more like a shiny green animal ready to pounce than a jumble of sticks covered in brown goo. It looked like the chair I had seen in my head when I set out to build it. I simply had to cover the wood with two coats of paint to uncover its true form.

Years later now, I’ve found that painting furniture well is a skill that requires careful cultivation. Since painting that first chair, I’ve painted a full set that I’ve built and have been experimenting with different mixes of paint and varnish (to give the paint a luminescence) and different brushing techniques. Painting a chair is as challenging as any hand-applied finish I’ve ever tried.

And now I know the truth: Paint doesn’t obscure mistakes. Instead, paint can reveal the form (good, bad or average) that we sometimes try to hide with flashy joinery, showy wood and shiny finishes. The opaque pigment lays bare our skills as designers of furniture, which is perhaps one of the real reasons we avoid painting the things we build. WM

— Chrisopher Schwarz

Sometime back in 1996 I took a piece of cloth that was cast off from my wardrobe. I cannot remember what the garment was. A sweatshirt perhaps? Long underwear? It’s a bit stretchy. And I soaked the sucker in WD-40.

Since that day, I have soaked that rag with every kind of oily substance you can imagine. Here’s the short lubricant list: Camellia, 3-in-1, Jojoba, mineral spirits, thread-cutting oil, spray-on “dry” shop lubricant and oil from various recesses of my personhood (yes, it’s true, and historically correct. Ask me over a beer sometime).

I use this rag to wipe down every tool after I use it. I lubricate my plane soles with it while working. I use it to wipe off the sharpening slurry from my tools after honing them.

And what I’m about to say will upset people who know anything about chemistry: I have never suffered any ill effects from this nefarious mixture when finishing my projects using any of the known finishing compounds: shellac, lacquer, oil, varnish, wax and all of their wacky combinations. No fish-eye has ever appeared in my finish. No orange peel. No silicone contamination.

So what gives? How have I cheated the finishing gods for 12 full years?

Probably because of the cutting action of all tools. When I wipe down a tool – a sawblade or a handplane – I leave the thinnest coat possible behind. This thin film is all I need to protect the tool from rusting. Then, when I apply the tool to the work, there is little doubt that some of this lubricant winds up on my work.

This first cut removes the lubricant from the tool. Then my next pass with the tool removes the wood that has the lubricant on it. Problem solved.

In addition to my magic rag (Lucy, my wife, calls it my “woobie”), I also am very fond of the Sandflex blocks from Klingspor to remove rare and errant spots of rust or staining that show up on my tools. These spongy “rust erasers” are like rubber that has been impregnated by a mild abrasive. The blocks will abrade your tools, but only slightly – in most cases less than steel wool. One block (I like the “medium” and “fine”) will last for decades of normal use.

As a result, I have had few problems with rust on my tools, despite the fact that I live outside a humid river city (Cincinnati) and my home shop is in a basement.

The bottom line is that diligence is far more important than the brand of lubricant.

— Christopher Schwarz

P.S. Below is my latest project with a shellac and lacquer finish with no finishing problems. Maybe next project....

Reader Greg Peel writes: I'm glad to see that the latest issue of Woodworking Magazine is a great one like the others. I was wondering if there is color picture of the pumpkin pine samples that you did for the issue? It looks very intriguing to me. I've always used some version of golden oak for my pine pieces and I like their color very much, but I'm always interested to working with antique wood and achieving an aged finish on new wood.

By the way, I miss the sepia toned look of the previous issues that was so rich and beautiful.

Greg: Below is a link so you can download a color-correct image of the bucket – the image above has more brown in it than the real finish. Of course, if your monitor stinks, then it probably has too much baby-poo green in it, as well.

On your comment about the sepia color in the current issues: For the next issue we'll be back on the same paper, our old printing press and the same color set-up. So... wish granted.

PumpkinPineBucket.jpg (87.5 KB)

— Christopher Schwarz

Adam Cherubini, who writes the Arts & Mysteries column for Popular Woodworking, ends up making a lot of his own tools to satisfy his 18th-century urges.

The handsaws you see in the photos of his work? Those aren’t Kenyon-style saws from Wenzloff & Sons. Those are saws that Adam made himself. Same with his wooden try squares and his fore plane (which actually is a Franken-plane from several donor tools).

So it should come as no surprise that Adam makes his own brushes for finishing. Recently he and I were talking about the process while we were at the Lie-Nielsen Hand Tool show in Philadelphia. The show was winding down and people were starting to pack up, but Adam was fired up about horsehair.

He’d made some brushes that he used to finish his standing desk, which has been the topic of his Arts & Mysteries column this year. The hair he had procured had come from a horse’s mane, and it had been a bit expensive.

As he discussed the details of the follicles and how he bundled them for the brush, his voice started to trail off a bit.

Have you ever seen one of those old cartoons where one character (such as a chickenhawk) starts to gaze hungrily at another (such as Foghorn Leghorn)? And then Foghorn mutates into an enormous steaming and juicy chicken leg?

Well that’s the weird vibe I was getting from Adam. He was staring at my hair, which was particularly long and scruffy that month.

“You know,” he said, reaching up, “your hair is just about the right coarseness for a brush….”

Now, Adam is a couple inches taller than I am. And he has the advantage of some extra mass and living in New Jersey. Simply put: Adam could probably scalp me with his “The Plane My Brother Is” with ease – if he could catch me. I do run 30 miles a week.

— Christopher Schwarz

P.S. Shameless plug: You can buy signed, deluxe versions of my new book on workbenches at my personal site, LostArtPress.com.

Someone once told me that woodworkers cannot talk to other woodworkers without using their hands to explain things. And that's true.

But I'd like to amend that aphorism to say that woodworkers also like to talk with their pencils. I've even taken to carrying around a notebook with me in my back pocket (as a trained journalist I'm allowed to do this. I'm also allowed to wear a fedora with my press pass in it. And have a whiskey bottle in my desk. Yup, that's journalism.)

So today is cover shoot day at Popular Woodworking. Managing Editor Megan Fitzpatrick and Senior Editor Glen D. Huey have designed and built a right nice chimney cupboard that is going to be the basis of an article on seven joints.

We begin the day by all of us almost getting fired.

Here's how: We decided to spray a coat of finish on the piece this morning. And we don't really have a spray booth anymore. And it's too chilly outside. And so…. you can kind of guess the rest. Despite some decent ventilation (fans, double doors), our HVAC system sucks the fumes into the building.

After the vice president of human resources left the shop, Glen and Megan finished the assembly of the cabinet while Senior Editor Robert W. "Bob" Lang, Photographer Al Parrish and Art Director Linda Watts and I worked out the details of the staging.

Oh, and one of our authors and a fellow blogger, David Mathias, is there for a visit. (Hello David. I promised we'd blog about you first. Neener.)

We can't get the details of the cover right. So I whip out my handy-dandy notebook and sketch up the gem of a cover you see to the right. Then the artistic ones on the staff turned it into the nice shot you see above. We're still tweaking it as I write. These things take time.

Bob was called in at one point to lug our artificial tree into the window (see this entry), but then we determined the tree wasn't necessary for the February cover. So Bob had to retrieve the tree. That tree has been on more covers than I have.

And that's our day up until lunch today. Time to hit the Halloween candy and see if there's something hiding at the bottom of my desk drawer.

— Christopher Schwarz

It’s lunchtime, but as I gaze into the fridge the only thing that looks good to me is a beer. I reach for the yogurt, but I almost change direction and grab the bottle of Fat Tire on the shelf above my milky bacterial fermentation.

Now before you start to worry that I’m in need of an intervention, hear me out. This craving for beer is what happens every time I spray lacquer. The first time I felt this urge more than 10 years ago I dismissed it as my brain telling me to take a victory lap because I’d finished a big project.

Now I think it’s something else. Perhaps my body is trying to replace one toxin with another. Perhaps something in lacquer or the thinner unlocks some alcoholic alter-ego. Believe me, I’m careful around finishing materials and their solvents. I wear a cartridge respirator the entire time I’m working. I wear gloves as I mix the lacquer and thinner. I spray outside on a breezy day.

But no matter what precautions I take, the result is always the same: Beer, beer, beer.

This morning I sprayed the finish coats of lacquer on the Gustav Stickley 802 sideboard that has been languishing in my shop as I’ve gallivanted through Maine and Las Vegas these last few weeks. My original plan to finish the sideboard was to use the suntan finish we developed for cherry in Woodworking Magazine Issue No. 5.

But I didn’t use that finish on the cherry dining table I built in 2005, so that gave me a bit of pause. In 10 years, I’d like these two pieces to look the same color in the same room. So I simply shot the sideboard with clear lacquer, which is the finish on the dining table. Three coats in two hours. God I love spray finishing.

Here’s a little tip for you the next time you’re at the hardware store: Pick up one of the 3M #180-grit sanding sponges. For the last couple years I’ve been using that between coats of lacquer and have decided that it is the bee’s knees. It levels lacquer quickly and brings up the white powdery look you want before shooting the next coat. Plus, the sponges last much longer than the lubricated sandpaper we use at work. When the sponges get a little clogged after a few months, just rinse them out with water and you’ll get some more life out of them.

So far, the sideboard looks pretty good. I like to let the lacquer level and cure for a day and then I rub it out with a plain brown paper bag to remove any dust nibs and give the finish a silky feel. So now I’m going to go down and see if we have any plain paper bags in the pantry.

If we don’t, I’m going to go to the liquor store and kill two needs with one purchase.

— Christopher Schwarz

What kind of sprayer do you recommend for applying a lacquer finish: gravity or siphon feed? Could you use the same sprayer for applying a stain? Thanks for your time and keep up the outstanding work on the Woodworking Magazine and blog.

I use a siphon-feed cup-gun sprayer, which has the material cup below the trigger. However, it seems that the world prefers the gravity-feed guns, which have the cup on top of the spray gun. Gravity guns are supposed to be more efficient because you don't need to use air to pressurize the cup below (gravity does all the work). And some people say they are more balanced.

I, however, find them personally awkward. I think they are top-heavy when fully loaded and I seem to ram the cup into everything as I maneuver around the workpiece.

My favorite set-up is what we called a "pressure pot," which is where the material is stored in a remote pressurized drum. Our Binks-brand pressure pot used to hold two gallons, which was really nice for big jobs. Plus the gun could go into really tight spaces because you didn't have any cup to swing around.

Of course, the seals on that pressure pot were kinda bad – it would lose pressure on occasion. We gave up the pressure pot when we moved into our new offices a few years ago and got rid of our spray booth.

And you can apply stain using a spray gun, as long as it's pretty thin (dyes spray quite well). It takes practice and you need to wipe things down pretty quickly after spraying. Perhaps that's why I've stuck with applying color by hand.

— Christopher Schwarz

It's curious that many of the people I know who are professional finishers and refinishers are also connoisseurs of drink. Whenever I spray finish – particularly lacquer – I always get an unusual craving for a beer. Perhaps it's simply the act of replacing one toxin for another. Or perhaps it is the drink of victory.

Either way, I spent a few hours this weekend completing my work on the Creole Table and drank a fine porter with my dinner to celebrate.

To get to the finish line (sorry for that) with this project, here is what had to be done:

First, I needed to clean up some serious and troublesome tear-out on the top. While the walnut I used on the table's base was quite mild and easy to work, the boards for the tabletop made me wish for a wide-belt sander. No matter what I did (high-angle plane, scraper, sandpaper) a couple areas of the tabletop refused to behave. One of the back corners in particular remained quite scaly, even after a serious work-over.

I tried scraping it one way. Then the other. Then the sandpaper. Then shellac (to stiffen the fibers) and some more scraping. Then the pirate-esque cursing, which of course didn't help anything. When I got the table surfaces looking as good as I could after an hour of work, I applied a coat of amber shellac to warm things up. Even though this walnut is air-dried and unsteamed,  I think that walnut can look a bit cool in cast with just a clear finish.

So on Saturday I applied some shellac and today I applied two coats of M.L. Campbell's Magnalac lacquer. I love this stuff. No matter what the humidity or my mood, the Magnalac is as forgiving of my every inadequacy as my spouse.

Is the day too humid? The stuff lays out flat. Bone-dry day? Same results. Is the coat too thin? It still works fine. In 10 years of working with the stuff, it has blushed on me only once. I've sprayed it with a variety of high- and low-pressure equipment and have always been impressed with Magnalac's versatility.

And boy is it fast. I sprayed the first coat at 10 a.m. this morning. Then I sprayed the second coat at 10:30 a.m. I took a quick shower and put a third coat on the tabletop (for grins) at 11:15 a.m. And now it looks perfect. I know that the purists out there really like the shellac and other hand-applied finishes. But I like to spray modern lacquer. Always have; always will.

But as I raised a glass this evening to cleanse one toxin with another, a dark thought passed briefly through my head: Now that the Creole Table is built and finished, it's time for the real work to begin. I have to write it up, prepare the drawings and get the sucker published.

— Christopher Schwarz

There's an adage that cherry is the wood that comes with a built-in stain. All you have to do is apply a clear topcoat and watch its rich color develop during the following years. Of course, that's not what most people do. Cherry, which is currently the most popular wood for commercial cabinets, is almost always colored before it leaves the shop.

But as you probably know, that almost always makes trouble. Applying stain, gel stain or dye to the raw wood will typically result in ugly blotching. So commercial furniture factories will tone the wood instead by adding color in the topcoats applied to the sealed wood. This muddies the beautiful grain, and it makes us wonder why so many people like the wood and pay a premium. A clear topcoat on cherry looks anemic until the color develops – and even clear cherry can show some blotching in our experience.

A survey of finishing books uncovered a large number of tricks to speed up cherry's aging process. (Or to mimic the aging process.) But the bottom line is that no one really knows for sure why cherry develops color when exposed to light and/or the atmosphere – we even consulted scientists at the Forest Products Laboratory who have studied the species.

But there is one thing that we could do to help. We could finish a bunch of boards using a variety of processes and find one that looked good most of the time and was relatively easy to do. So we tried drain cleaner, a wide variety of colored topcoats, oils and clear finishes. And we tried to accelerate the aging process by exposing some of the finished boards to varying amounts of sunlight.

And when we ran out of real sunlight (always a problem in Cincinnati), we went to the neighborhood tanning salon. Shown in the photo above is our photographer, Al Parrish, taking a quick photo of one of the test pieces during its time in the tanning bed.

Perhaps the most surprising thing about the whole experience was that the staff at the tanning salon was completely unfazed by our request to put some wood in the tanning bed. How much did it cost? After Senior Editor David Thiel sweet-talked the staff, it was a free visit.

After we treated all the boards we lined them up in the shop under our color-corrected bulbs, and had the staff pick their favorites (the finishing schedule of each sample board was hidden). There was an immediate and clear winner among all the staff members – except Managing Editor Megan Fitzpatrick, who liked the board treated with drain cleaner.

Like all finishing schedules for cherry, ours isn't perfect. But I think you'll find the process we'll outline in the Spring 2006 issue straightforward, simple and sound.

— Christopher Schwarz

When it comes to finishing, I'm first to admit I can be a bit chicken. I do work hard at finishing, but I generally stick with what I know. And I avoid wetsanding the finish at all costs. I tried several times to get wetsanding right, but I always had problems getting a consistent sheen on the entire project without cutting through the topcoat.

But I really want that nice smooth and tactile feel you get with quality finishing work. My workarounds to get that are pretty involved. And that's why I decided it was time to buck up and get a wee bit brave this weekend as I finished the prototype project for Issue 5, A Shaker cabinet reproduction.

About five years ago, John Wilson gave me one of his tips that he uses for getting a nice finish on his Shaker boxes: rubbing them with a brown paper bag. I never tried it myself, but I filed away the idea. Last week, finishing expert Bob Flexner made the same recommendation and commented that the paper bag merely rounded over the nibs in the topcoat and really didn't cut the finish like sandpaper did. In other words, it was pretty chicken-compliant.

So this morning I headed down to the shop with a paper bag from the liquor store and gave it a try on the underside of one of the interior shelves I has topcoated with lacquer the day before. After about five or six strokes I ran my fingers over the surface and is was quite smooth. So I tried it on the top surface of the shelf. Same thing. And I looked at it in a reflected light and could see no scratches or real change in the sheen. Braver and braver, I tried it on the beaded backboards, the backside of the door and then took a deep breath. I did the case sides, the face frame and the rest of the show surfaces.

I'm sold.

After "bagging" about half the cabinet I noticed that the nibs from the finish were abrading the bag a bit, but this didn't seem to change the way the bag worked. I did get some of the white powder from the lacquer that you get from sanding, but I couldn't discern any change in the look of the finish – just the feel.

— Christopher Schwarz