Thread: Finishing Douglas Fir

A while since I've used Douglas fir. The hard wax/oil finishes are worth considering. I've used Evolution but there are others around. I just wipe it on with a cloth. It's almost foolproof.

I've done hard wax oil on a douglas fir bedside table. It came up well.

My preference is for Danish Oil, wet sanding as you add the next coat and it will make it pop. The good thing about DO is it is so easy to repair any damage or recoat.
Rgds,
Crocy.

I recently made a bread box from recycled Douglas Fir that had seen about 30 years of service as joists in an outdoor deck. I finished it with a few coats of super blonde shellac and then rubbed on some beeswax polish with 0000 steel wool. It looks great and the super blonde shellac didn’t alter the colour.

You should be able to find the shellac flakes in Japan. I used a 1 pound cut (12g of flakes to 100mL of ethanol).

P.S. i also made a storage box for potatoes and finished it with danish oil. I found it made the wood quite pink/orange.

Unlike any of the other conifer woods, Douglas-fir shows a spiral thickening in the S2 of the xylem secondary cell wall.
This warps unequally to make a fuzzy textured surface after wetting with finish.

The common technique here is to allow the first coat to set up hard.
(Expect to apply a second of more coats of finish.)

Next, gently scour the surface with XXX coarse steel wool.
The strands are flat and cut like a million chisels to smooth the wood surface by cutting off the warped cell fragments.
Sanding only shreds the surface more finely.

Last, complete the finish application.
Bit of a lottery, age and source seem to determine the finished colors with transparent apps.