Archives

I get a lot of questions about finish problems, and, as you can imagine, they are often difficult to diagnose simply from the description. In these situations, a picture can really be worth a [...]

After my last post (April 10) about wearing gloves when spraying with a spray gun, I thought it might be appropriate to discuss aerosols as a substitute for spray guns. There are two types of [...]

I’ll probably get pushback on this, but here goes anyway. I’d love to hear your objections. Look at the above picture. What seems odd to you? It’s not something small. It’s jumping right off the [...]

A friend called with a finish question. He had just made a guitar in a guitar-making class and wanted to know the best finish for it. He began with the statement that he didn’t have a spray [...]

I got a question from a professional woodworker wanting to know if he could market the shellac he used as “all natural,” or if Zinsser put non-natural ingredients in their shellac that [...]

This is another installment in my series on smart coatings. You can access the others by typing in “smart” in the search box near the top of my main blog page. For this installment, I’m reporting [...]

A professional woodworker got in touch with this question. He had finished a sixty-foot long countertop for a brewery tasting room with catalyzed (conversion) varnish. After the finish dried for [...]

In the October, 2017 issue of Popular Woodworking, page 10, I answered a question from a reader concerning how to handle paint on an exterior door that was beginning to lift at the cross-grain [...]

You may be familiar with the problem Apple is having with their newly released Home Pods and the white rings they sometimes leave on wood surfaces. Apple explains that they come from the [...]

I’ve written this many times and said it many more. The film thickness of a finish is much more important for preventing water getting through to the wood than the type of finish. For [...]

  A woodworker friend called wanting to know where he could buy some methylated spirits. He had just read in a book that it was the best solvent to use with shellac. So I asked him if the [...]

A woodworker friend asked me what type colorants, pigment or dye, were used in Minwax stains. He had called Minwax and was told that they use only pigment, but this didn’t match with my friend’s [...]