hello!
i just finish my work piece(krenov inspired cabinet) with two coats of teak oil (by”watco”), and about two days later i add another coat of shellac, it looks terrible, the shellac created uneven surface with somy sticky spots. i assume i didnt let enought time for the oil to fully dry. is there a way to fix that?
thank you
Replies
It would be great to see a picture. I suspect you are on the right track, the watco probably needed a longer time to cure\dry. is it still gummy, or is the shellac hard now? you can try to remove the shellac with alcohol, but you may be just as well off scraping off all the finish and starting over.
Separate question - why start with watco and overcoat with shellac? If I were finishing this, I would probably use a finish such as Osmo (or my favorite - Odie's oil finish). There's a nice review of oil-wax finishes in FWW:
https://www.finewoodworking.com/2024/06/24/testing-hard-wax-oil-finishes
Thank you! I will test the alcohol method, but also why not just try to sand it as is? I'm from Israel, which means we don't have here wide variety of good finishing products such as odies, osmo and general finishes
If you sand it the gummy finish will clog the sandpaper. You can try....
One good thing about shellac is some rags soaked in DNA will let you strip it back pretty cleanly. If your oil finish is gummy underneath you will also have to fix that. I have not used the Teak Oil product from Watco but have used other products from them that they call Danish Oils. Four to five days of curing are recommended before top coating. I use the sniff test; if I can still smell the VAC odor it is still off-gassing, I wait another day.
I had one piece early on where I did a bad job of applying shellac. I did the soak rags in denatured alcohol for like 10 minutes on the piece and then was able to wipe off the shellac fairly easily.
What guided your decision to coat oil with shellac? It’s not a recipe I’ve seen before.
Quit mixing products. Simple is better. That said, two days wasn't even close to enough time. Two weeks would be more like it and even then that might not have been long enough.
That product wouldn't cure in two days if you were working in Phoenix, Arizona in July.
Alcohol removal might work. Sanding the whole thing down to as close to bare wood as possible could work also, but it might be a mess since there are "sticky" spots. I'd let it dry for awhile before doing anything just to see if some of the spots would resolve themselves and to make resanding less of a mess.
Also, I would agree with trying to keep finishing simple. For many years, I've just used various polyurethanes, both water based and oil based. I like oil based better. I've also used General's Gel Poly which is really easy to use but requires more coats. Minwax Wipe On is good. General's Arm-R-Seal. If you can't get those, then a good oil-based poly is always a good fall-back. Starting with a couple of coats of 2# Shellac is good to seal the surface. It goes on easy, dries within minutes, and it sealls the surface so that you need less coats of poly. It's just easy and reliable. I've also had great success with 100% tung oil thinned a bit with citrus based solvent. It helps the tung oil dry faster and smells like oranges from the solvent. (Just be careful that you are really buying real tung oil; not some of the mixes many companies sell as tung oil.)
I've tried other finishes like Maloof's wax/oil finish. I would avoid mixing types of finish, especially shellac over oil.
Thank you very much. Definitely helpful !
Noting AFAIK there is no "teak" in that product. It's another blend of linseed oil, solvents, and varnish. So linseed oil takes a long time to cure.