Kylene reminded me last night that I need to make another chest of drawers.

Uh oh.

And I still hadn’t started the rocking chairs.

Uh Oh.

And I’ve only got like two weeks till Christmas, and like a month until the new baby decides it’s time to show up.

Uh oh.

So I mixed up some shellac today, in a 2lb cut (good for sealing) so I could coat the BLO on the cherry pieces I’m not giving details on. I need to put something overtop the BLO, and without the shellac (no-wax shellac at that) it’s not going to stick.

While the shellac was dissolving in the alcohol, I re-stacked about half the lumber pile.

The stack is much more stable now, and the parts I restacked are organized by thickness and grain likeness. There is a lot of 3/4 on top now, instead of seeing 6/4 and 8/4. Makes the pile look a lot more useable. About 60% of the stack is 3/4″ wood, you just couldn’t -tell- by the way it was stacked.

Once I had things stacked better I planed a lot of 4/4 rough to 3/4″ finished and ran a few 4/4′s that were bulky down to 7/8″.

All the planing was done with the garage open. Yes, it’s -cold- out now — and I was doing this after dark. It was -cold-, I had two shirts and a sweatshirt on, and that kept me pretty comfortable while I was busy moving.

Planing finished and with the dust all cleaned up, I went back to the shellac. It’s a deep orange / red Garnet shellac. Gorgeous color — especially on cherry. So I started with the first piece and did the portion I needed shellac on so I can get a top coat of something else. I had a minor problem that led me to try covering the entire piece in shellac, just to see what it would look like.

I’m not very good with shellac. It dries so fast that it’s darn near impossible to not get runs in it. Once you get runs in it, trying to do what do you with polyurethane to fix the run is a -bad- idea.. it gets worse, or you end up washing off the shellac from the thin parts on each side of the run….

So I ended up shellacing the entire piece, then removing the shellac… with steel wool and alcohol. Worked like a charm. The shellac is off, and I’ve re-coated with BLO just to make sure that we get a nice finish on it.

As a side effect of shellacing then removing most of it… The garnet shellac seems to have filled the low places in the wider grain of the cherry — acting like a glaze and really bringing out the grain in the wood. More so than just BLO. That piece now looks -really- interesting.

I’m not going to do it to the other projects I’m working on, but I think it looks cool and makes this one more unique.

This entry was posted on Saturday, December 5th, 2009 at 10:28 pm and is filed under Core Dump. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.