Finishing Pine

[nalsalam]

OK, I screwed up. My son is building some pine book cases and I'm acting as consultant and assistant. He just started to stain them. He first applied Minwax pre-stain to reduce the uneven absorption of stain into the pine. An hour later, he applied the first coat of minwax stain. Unfortunately, the stain did not aborb in a couple of spots where we apparently did not clean up the excess glue well enough. The stain also did not absorb in some other spots away from where we filled nail holes with plastic wood but where the puddy knife had pulled away the excess.

The question is how to fix these problems? (I want my son's first project to be a success.) Sand the spots? Sand the whole side where the spots appear? Apply paint remover? Something else.

Thanks for your advice.

[HayZee518]

do you know how to apply stain? you flow it on with a brush and IMMEDIATELY wipe it off with a dry rag in the direction of the grain. pine is an open grain wood so it will soak up the stain rather quickly. for filling in nail spots use DURHAM'S WATER PUTTY. Plastic wood is a synthetic solvent based filler that doesn't take to stains good. areas that have had glue exuded, best scrape what you can with a putty knife or be extremely careful with a razor blade scraper then sand with 320 grit open coat aluminum oxide sandpaper. to try to repair what you got now for nail holes, you could try counterboring the nail set holes and use durhams to fill it in.

[nalsalam]

Thanks. So using plastic wood was a mistake, and we will not repeat that. We'll use something like DURHAM's WATER PUDDY in the future. Since we used the minwax pre-stain product, we did not wipe off the stain immediately. That produce limits the absorption.

There is no visible glue or plastic wood on the project (expect over the nail holes), but both left something invisible in or on the wood that limits the absorption of stain into the wood. I take it that your advice at this stage is for us to go back and scape carefully and re-sand the affected areas to get rid of the invisible stuff?

[HayZee518]

a sanding sealer is normally applied to keep the grain from raising but in the case of pine, its best just left alone. a sealer is basically a white shellac with an alcohol vehicle. once the sealer is applied it leaves an "invisible" coating like you experienced. use the 320 grit sandpaper or / and a steel scraper to remove what you can and re-apply the stain.

[sam999]

hello all,
I have some very old pine book shelves and they still look good.

I used a product called-----Tung oil as it is made of a renewable resource, from nuts. Once dry it is no longer toxic smelling, but apply it out of doors to save your intake of the smell.

This site talks about some different ideas for you----sankey.ws/pine.html

[sully3191]

I just had my pine dining room floor sealed with Tung Oil, after much investigation. 4 coats and it is an amazing product. That floor is gorgeous. As mentioned, it is a green product. I am very very happy with the end result.
Another nice thing about tung oil is you can reapply it to small areas and it will blend nicely, from what I was told. You don't need to sand off preceding coats.
Sully