Popular Woodworking 2007-11 № 165, страница 98

Home-center Finishing

You can achieve a great finish from commonly available products.

Flexner on Finishing

by bob flexner

Home-store finishing. You don't have to go to specialty retailers to find finishing supplies; you can produce a quality finish from products readily available at home centers.

W.u love home centers for the good stuff they carry and for their low prices. But home centers cater to the lowest common denominator consumer - that is, they carry only the stuff that has a big market.

The result is that many of the finishing products used on furniture and cabinets, products you read about in woodworking magazines or hear about in woodworking classes, are rarely found in these stores. Examples include very fine-grit sandpapers, dyes, glazes, paste wood fillers, spray lacquers and high-performance finishes such as catalyzed lacquer.

So how do you proceed if you have to do your finishing entirely from the products available at home centers?

It's not all that difficult, really. You're just limited in some of the decorative effects you can achieve - decorative effects you're probably not interested in anyway because you're using the natural color and figure of the wood for your decoration.

With the limited choice of finishing products at home centers, you can still get all the following:

■ Protection and durability ranging from minimal to the best possible

■ A sheen ranging from gloss to dead flat

■ Finishes ranging from amber to colorless

■ A near-flawless finish resembling sprayed lacquer

■ Elimination of blotching from stains

■ A glaze substitute

■ A pore-filling option

■ The ability to block off problems in the wood.

Marketing

Before proceeding with how to accomplish these objectives, I want to explain how com

panies producing and marketing finishing materials sell their products (how all companies probably sell their products, for that matter).

Finish companies target specific markets. Within any given category - oil stain, varnish, water-based finish, etc. - all companies' products are very similar, if not identical. But because stores and catalogs carry different brands, and because the marketing can sometimes make you believe some brands are somehow better than others, you may think you're getting inferior products at low-end, mass-consumer home centers when you're not.

For example, a big brand name in home

centers is Minwax, while General Finishes and Behlen dominate in woodworking stores and catalogs, and Old Masters is popular in independent paint stores. There are also stores that feature Sherwin-Williams, Benjamin Moore, Pratt & Lambert, Varathane and many other brands.

In addition, some companies target just contractors, others target cabinet and furniture makers, and still others (an entirely different group of companies) target refinishers.

Within any finish category - oil stain, glaze, varnish, lacquer, etc. - all these companies make essentially the same thing. They all have access to the same raw materials, and the instructions for putting these raw materi

96 ■ Popular Woodworking November 2007

LEAD PHOTO BY AL PARRISH; STEP PHOTOS BY AUTHOR