I’ve been answering your finishing questions both professionally for pay and pro bono for hobby woodworkers since 1980 in magazines, chat rooms, message boards, websites and for the past decade, on this website turned blog. The time has come to move on.

After I post this last batch of questions, I will no longer be adding content to this site; nor will I be answering your questions on a daily basis.

What can you do if you have a finishing problem? First, peruse this blog’s archives; chances are your question has been covered here. If not, try www.woodanswers.com , at site at which I fielded over 8,000 finishing questions over a five year period. It’s almost certain to have the information you need.

You might also want to read my books. Two in particular are, in my opinion, very helpful, especially as a pair. They are The New Wood Finishing Book and its natural companion, Wood Finishing Fixes. Both are available at the Books and Videos section of this website.

Finally, if you are really in a pinch, you can write to me, but I won’t be doing any more free answers. You will be expected to pay my regular consultation rates. If you need a quote in advance, send the question and ask for a quote.

This does not mean I won’t be writing. Starting almost immediately I will be writing a blog for my other website, www.rainydayukes.com It will take readers through my daily tasks building ukuleles by hand, using sustainable, local wood and “green” building methods. Hopefully, it will be an entertaining read; you can follow along during the birth of a ukulele, and even get first shot at buying it once it is done.

Michael Dresdner
www.rainydayukes.com
“You can’t stay sad while playing a uke.”

Q: I recently made an octagonal table top out of leftover red oak flooring. I wiped an oil based red mahogany penetrating stain on the sanded, raw wood. When I put on the second coat there appeared one strip about an inch wide where the stain just wiped off leaving an unsightly light area in contrast to the deep color of the rest of the table top. There is some variation in color and shade, obviously, from board to board, which I expected and am fine with, but this area is almost the shade of the raw wood and sticks out like a sore thumb. What can I do?
A: The easiest way to blend colors after staining is with tinted topcoat applied between the first and second coats of clear finish. You can mix your own or buy some finishes, such as polyurethane, already in tinted form, both in liquid and aerosol versions. Some companies, like Varathane, match their tinted polyurethanes to their wood stains, making blending a fairly easy task.

Q: What is a good, sprayable gloss finish for a bass guitar made of several woods?
A: Lacquer is certainly the most user friendly for instruments. It is easy to apply, repair and buff, and it dries quickly. Because you are using multiple woods, it would be wise to seal the instrument first with one coat of Zinsser SealCoat.

Q: How do I stop the oil from coming out of woods like wenge, cocobolo and rosewood when I apply lacquer?
A: The term oily wood is a misnomer. While some woods are highly resinous, there is no oil in wood, so there is no oil to come out. Some woods may bleed color, meaning the color can migrate into the lacquer. Usually, that’s not a serious issue, but if it is, seal the wood first with a coat of Zinsser SealCoat. Once it dries, it should block further bleeding. Incidentally, wenge is neither particularly resinous nor likely to bleed, though the other two, both of which are dalbergias, are resinous and will bleed color.

Q: I plan to sand interior mahogany doors with 180 and 220 grit, stain one coat, let it dry, sand it with 320 grit, then apply three coats of polyurethane, sanding between these coats with 320 grit. After the final finishing coat, let it dry and cure for one month then follow your recommend scrubbing process, sanding 1000 grits and 000 steel wool with paste wax and then buff it with buffer. Is the right process for interior doors?
A: Nope. Let’s go through this a step at a time, starting with sanding. Unless someone else already sanded the door to 120 or 150, you need to start with a coarser paper than 180. Typically, we start sanding at 80 and go up from there. You can stop at 180 garnet, or 220 AlOx.
Stain should be flooded on liberally, then wiped off completely, leaving only what the wood has absorbed. Never sand after staining, since it will remove the stain you just applied, and do it unevenly at that.
Once the stain is dry, apply your finish at the rate of one coat per day. Sand between coats only if you need to in order to smooth roughness, dust nibs or brush marks. Otherwise, sanding between coats is not necessary as long as the next coat goes on the next day.
To rub to satin, wait a couple of weeks, remove any dust nibs with 400 or 500 grit paper, then rub with the grain using 0000 steel wool lubricated with paste wax. For gloss, wait six weeks, sand through the grits from 600 to 1200 or higher, then rub with automotive rubbing and polishing compounds.

Q: I am trying to refinish an oak floor that is in a home built around 1960. It has a clear finish, but when I start sanding with the ezV sander, the finish clumps, sticks to the sandpaper and clogs. I have no idea what the finish is, but I am looking for suggestions on removing it so that I don’t have to stop every couple of minutes and scrape the flakes off the sandpaper.
A: The ezV sander is very user friendly, but not very aggressive. You might want to switch to a more aggressive type of sander, such as a drum sander, to remove the finish. That allows you to use a coarser paper at first, such as 24 grit. There’s no easy way to avoid clogging if you are removing a soft finish, but there are methods other than sanding. For instance, scraping off the finish with a ship’s scraper, then sanding afterwards, is more labor intensive but less frustrating. The same is true of stripping the floor first with paint remover; messier and smellier, but it does eliminate clogging expensive paper.

Michael Dresdner
www.michaeldresdner.com
Metaphors be with you.

A: Right off the top of my head, I can think of several things that could be the problem. One will simply require a bit of patience, but the others may require more work.
Although the temperature is right for quick drying, there is another environmental factor that is equally important; humidity. Very high humidity can disable the driers in oil based coatings, both stain and finish. Thus, they will lose their solvent, and give the appearance of being more or less dry, but will not cure and may remain tacky for up to a week or more.
How you stained is another factor. Stains are meant to go onto raw wood, be flooded on, then wiped off, leaving only what the wood absorbed. Brushing stain on, as if it were paint, can result in not only slow cure, but a finish with weak adhesion.
Finally, there is preparation. You mentioned sanding, but did not say whether you stripped the existing finish, or whether you cleaned the surface to remove dirt, oil or grease. With woods like oak that have very large pores, sanding alone will usually not remove either the finish in the pores or the accumulated dirt and oils surfaces tend to accumulate. In fact, sanding a contaminated surface can drive oils further into the wood. Such contamination can inhibit the cure of any finish.
If the humidity is high, give it more time and hope that is the only problem, but if any of the other steps were done in error, you may have a larger problem on your hands. And for the record, none of these problems are related to the brand, so using a different one would not have mattered.

A: For future reference, the best way to remove watermarks from raw wood is with oxalic acid. Still, laundry bleach usually does not create problems with waterbased finishes. However, laundry bleach reduces to water and salt when it dries. It’s not common, but excess amounts of salt in the wood could cause waterbased finish to go haywire.
I’m not sure what you meant by other areas, but if the same thing happened in areas that were not bleached, we can discount the bleach as the culprit. Waterbased finish that behaves the way you described, setting to a wax instead of a film, can also be caused by high humidity. In addition, there are other contaminants that could be responsible, but without a lot more information, I could not tell you exactly what they are in your case. Your best bet is to start over; go back down to the bare wood, scrub with TSP in water to remove any salt or grease residues, then when the floor is dry and lightly resanded, add one coat of Zinsser SealCoat, a clear primer, before applying the waterbased floor finish.