Thread: Buffing a finish

Depending on what is needed, I do some or all of the following;

1. Sand lightly with 1500 or finer grit paper

2. Rub hard with Meguiars Mirror Glaze Medium Cut Cleaner, which is basically just a coarse car polish with no silicon. Silicon is usually present in the cheaper car polishes and makes recoating difficult. I use a tea towel (the common stripey type, which seems to have the right combination of grunt and delicacy). Just rub hard by hand.

3. Rub hard with Meguiars Mirror Glaze Swirl Remover, or any other very fine automotive polish which contains no silicon.

That's it.

You can do just 1. and 3 with a bit more rubbing
Or just 2. and 3.
Or just 3 for very light imperfections
But not just 1 and 2, it won't polish up to the max.


In truth though, buffing polyurethane is not really very effective. It's possible, and it does look better for a period of time, but it's not what the product is made for so it doesn't take to it like lacquer or shellac. That's one of the reasons most of us avoid the stuff.

Two other techniques I use for really bad cases are;

Spray a coat of lacquer thinner over the lot. For lacquer, it works well to remove mishaps and I've heard people say they just routinely finish everything with a coat of straight thinner. Not sure about that though, sounds like tempting fate to me.

Prepare a mix of thinner, alcohol and the product and rub this over with a cloth rubber. It works really well with lacquer and shellac to fill in scratches and divots that are too deep to sand out.

I don't think either of these would work with polyurethane as there is a curing process. However there is a curing stage with pre-cat lacquer and it works with them so maybe they could work in modified form with wipe-on?

Also, the poly would have to be well cured before you attempt to buff it. Maybe two weeks.

Also, cut your fingernails first.

Cheers
Arron

Thanks Arron, I am at the worlds largest cross road and this box is absolutely doing my head in. I know it's not perfect in my eyes and so I don't feel comfortable giving it until it is. I fiddled with it and now I'm fixing up damage from the fiddling as it's frustrating the hell out of me.

im too scared to sand back yet too scared to keep going. I now have to add a coat or 2 to the base carcass to match the top due to extra coats.

so I may wait for 2wks for it to cure enough to micro-mesh through the finer grits so as not to go too hard and it should take enough off the top to level and remove fine particles.

i might listen to the hugs and kisses next time when she says "darl that perfect, don't touch it". I just want to hurry up and give this gift but as they don't know it's coming, I have all the time in the world.

Arron, ps. What do you mean by "it does look better for a period of time"?

Sandpapers shred the surface. Fine or coarse, they all shred the surface.
Buffing compounds are no more that very fine abrasives, you can't see the scratches.
I quit.
Instead, I use XXX coarse steel wool. The fibers are flat not round.
As such, they slide and glide and cut like a thousand chisels.

This is particularly easy to see and feel if you are trying to make a smooth finished surface on Douglas-fir (Pseudotsuga menziesii) aka "Oregon."
The spiral thickening in the S2 of the secondary cell walls will cause the cut cells to warp and stick up above the wood surface.
Let the first finish coat set up, good and hard. Shave off all those fibers with coarse steel wool ( "fine" is useless). End of problem.

If I'm working in hardwoods like birch, I'll use a cabinet scraper which cuts the surface, never shredding it.

Originally Posted by Fumbler

Arron, ps. What do you mean by "it does look better for a period of time"?

I did a number of boxes with wipe on about 10 years ago and buffed them. They looked ok. After 5 years they looked terrible. Dull, lifeless, finish. Easily scratched and worn looking and not really repairable.

Unfortunately I can't be any more specific because we have a cat with pica (OCD for cats, afflicted cats chew timber compulsively) so they were damaged and thrown out, as was virtually everything else timber that we owned.

I felt at the time that the buffed ones fared worse then the older unbuffed ones. It could just be that the finer finish showed marks quicker - can't really remember.

You've probably gathered by now that I'm not a fan of wipe-on. I went through a stage for a few years of finishing everything I did with wipe on. It was OK for larger items but for small items that you handle and inspect very closely I found the same as you - that I was always frigging with it and never quite happy and always doing one more coat and just fixing up this one little bit. Every now and then one piece would seem to go off the rails and, like yours, everything I did seemed to make it worse. Eventually I decided that the product just wasn't designed for doing what I was trying to do with it.

FWIW, after the wipe-on phase I spent a couple of years in my shellac phase. That also wasn't very good. The product was great, had a nice look and I appreciated it's repairability, but I was selling stuff by then and it was just too labour intensive to make decent money. Then, about 5 years ago, I started into spray finishing with industrial lacquer and I was home. Iron-hard, unchanging finishes that were flawless straight off the gun, and done from start to finish in a morning. What I really liked was that once you were finished, you were finished. No profit destroying frigging required, but if an items finish was damaged between making and sale then it was a simple matter to repair it.

Arron, thank you. I can't wait til I get to the spraying stage, but as space is limited a balcony is not really conducive to quality spray finish. Thanks for the advice. I seem to be coming around to the slight imperfections and will now wait til cured before assessing the next round of damage I may cause.