Newsletter October 12, 2002

Much to my pleasant surprise, our Refinishing Furniture Newsletter was featured and reviewed on the List-A-Day web site. One of the nicer places on the Internet to be noticed.

If you've recently cleaned any metal, brass, copper, bronze or other type and you've used anything other than a mild soap and soft cloth you may have removed some of the lacquer protective coat. Most cleaners have an abrasive, although very mild they can remove some lacquer with each cleaning. You can get lacquer in spray cans and respray the protective coat. If you get a lot of tarnish quickly, that means the lacquer coat is already gone and the metal needs to be cleaned well and sprayed. Be sure to use true lacquer made with nitrocellulose.

Sometimes it's awfully tempting to take a paint laden piece of furniture to a dipper and have the paint removed in a matter of minutes rather than to take hours to strip it by hand.

It's best to resist the temptation. The speed at which dipping removes paint is great, but as with most things that cut corners and look too good to be true on the surface, they are too good to be true down under too.

A stripping procedure that works so fast has to be very powerful and it is. Most dipping procedures work on the glue joints too. Some will be evident as soon as the furniture is stripped and washed, a chair that had tight joints before may do the hootchy-kootchy or a dresser may sway like someone that got into the hard cider. In some cases the boards that are joined edge to edge to make large surfaces like a table top will start to separate at their ends leaving small cracks at each joint on the table top edges.

Other furniture may have tighter joints and will wait until you have them finished, then start to loosen up, so you have to work with your newly finished furniture to repair the joints.

The only remedy for those pieces is to completely dismantle them, clean out the remaining glue and reassemble them.

The power of the powerful will also work on the soft portions of the wood, and all wood, no matter how hard, has some soft portions too. When you get newly dipped furniture back with a fuzzy feel and the instructions that all you need to do is sand them down and they're just like new, that's not exactly correct. The fuzziness is from mushed cell walls in the wood and it takes a lot of sanding to get below the fuzz. If the furniture has a carved or indented design you may have to sand some of the less deep areas of the design clear out to get rid of the fuzziness.

When you finally do get the sanding all done and you get the piece stained and finished it may have that 'not quite how you imagined it' appearance. The reason is that generally some of the diluted paint or finish, or the fine residue from someone else's furniture that was remaining in the dip tank has soaked into the wood of your furniture. After a piece has been dipped, if you apply stripper and use the usual procedure for hand stripping you will get a considerable amount of residue from the dipping.

After you hand strip after dipping, sand, disassemble, clean joints and reassemble you're ready to finish your furniture.

If an antique is dipped you can usually figure that at least half of it's antique value is left in the dipping tank.

If you need to dismantle a piece of furniture, it's best to have a rubber mallet, available at most hardware stores. The rubber will give instead of the wood and you won't make lots of little dents in your furniture.

We're going to have a series on Faux and other decorative finishes in our newsletter with some new information in each newsletter. Get out the brushes, feathers, sponges, even the end of your nose if it will get the effect you want (just kidding . . . I think)

What is Faux Finish? It's a painting technique which will simulate a design found in nature, such as wood, marble, a leaf or other natural design, or if the notion strikes you, any design that's pleasant to you that uses the same painting techniques.

Faux Finishes consist, generally, of multiple layers of translucent, transparent and solid colors for making the different designs of wood grain, marble or whatever free style suits your fancy. We'll go into some things like wood burning and painting and stenciling designs plus some other things.

Actually anything that doesn't simulate something natural would have to be considered decorative painting rather than faux, because a frenchman would slap his forehead and exclaim, "for goodness sake", however they say it in France, because getting to the nitty gritty, faux means fake in French.

Whoops, did someone say they can't paint a design? Have you tried? I'll bet a dollar to a hole in a donut that you might surprise yourself.

Our first project will be faux crackling, faking the age cracking, or aligatoring that we would like to get rid of on some of our older pieces of furniture.

The first thing you'll need is a surface to crackle. If you don't have a piece of furniture you'd like to crackle, you might go to a thrift store and buy a little table to practice on. Some people might like to just use a piece of scrap wood for a beginning practice shot.

And away we go. Sand the surface so that it's nice and smooth. If there are any cracks, gouges or other owies they can be filled with something like a premixed spackling compound, since we'll be painting and nobody will ever know what you've used until sometime in the future when somebody will pick up your little table in a thrift store and wonder why anyone would paint such a nice little table, then they'll take it home and strip it and so on.

That should be enough to keep you out of mischief until next time.

For all your wicker repair, basket making kits, caning and other associated needs you can find a good selection of Wicker and Caning Supplies with good prices and a reliable secure supplier that has been in business for many years and will be around for a lot more.

Here is a problem I hear of often enough that it would be good to mention it here.

Wood burning is lots of fun and relaxing. The smell as you're burning the design in the wood is reminiscent of a campfire or burning leaves and twigs in the fall. Where are the marshmallows? You can find lots of Wood Burning and associated tools at another secure and reliable supplier we've found.