W. Red cedar void filling?

My mom talked me into cutting some cedar boards up for her to use as interior trim panels despite my best efforts to talk her out of it. These have some pretty large (2"x1/4" or so) voids and a few knots with chunks out of them or small cracks. Trying to make the best of a complicated situation I'm looking at something I can use to fill the voids somewhat and stabilize the knots.

My best shot so far is West System 3 with either some sawdust and/or a little dye and some 403 filler added, but wanted to plumb the collective wisdom to see if anyone had a better idea. Its western red and is fairly mixed red/brown, the knots darken up quite a bit with any finish (quite pretty and wide boards, just a lot of "character").

I believe that she's going to use either a wiping varnish or poly on top.

Thanks.

I would mix white glue with sanding powder, from your orbital sander, and use it as a filler. Another way I have done it is to mix this wood powder with lacquer sanding sealer. With the sanding sealer if you miss sanding it off a little, when dry, it will not show like the white glue will, under the finish. Glue and powder works best for large voids though. JUst sand on some of your cedar to get the powder.

I would second that.

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Originally Posted by Jim Finn

I would mix white glue with sanding powder, from your orbital sander, and use it as a filler. Another way I have done it is to mix this wood powder with lacquer sanding sealer. With the sanding sealer if you miss sanding it off a little, when dry, it will not show like the white glue will, under the finish. Glue and powder works best for large voids though. JUst sand on some of your cedar to get the powder.

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I prefer the original idea of the epoxy resin colored to mimic the knots and other imperfections. Glue and sawdust has never been pleasing to me for use as filler. Subjective, I know... ;)

Thanks all, yeah I've had mixed luck with white glue and sawdust.. it often ends up with a color I find less than pleasing (kind of muddy) and was hoping that the epoxy would end up cleaner looking (this doesn't seem to be always true and I haven't quite figured out why..).

After thinking about it all day (while doing other stuff :D) I think I'll go ahead and get the epoxy and and do a test run both ways and see what looks best. I believe the voids are to large for sanding sealer, but that sounds like a good trick and worth adding to the toolbox.

Your water based glues will shrink too much to be viable in a void that size. For larger gaps you need something that can support itself and have little to no shrinking. Two part epoxy (with a catalyst, not a hardener) takes color well although I have colored resin/hardener based products successfully if the color is dark enough to overcome the yellowing of the product. YMMV.

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Originally Posted by glenn bradley

Your water based glues will shrink too much to be viable in a void that size. For larger gaps you need something that can support itself and have little to no shrinking. Two part epoxy (with a catalyst, not a hardener) takes color well although I have colored resin/hardener based products successfully if the color is dark enough to overcome the yellowing of the product. YMMV.

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I'm not aware of two part epoxies with catalysts, not hardeners. Is that West System epoxy, or some other brand?

Quick update. I ended up doing a "soak" coat with epoxy on the bark in the voids to stabilize it and then filled them with two passes of epoxy mixed with sanding dust. There were also a few hairline cracks and for those I used white glue mixed with sanding dust. The hairline cracks completely disappeared, the eopxy looks "ok". I tried white glue and sanding dust in the larger voids but they looked really unnatural with the darker bark and then the lighter infill.

Overall I'm moderately happy with it for what it is but I think it would look better with a little darker infill. My test runs were on some end pieces with a little smaller holes and they came out pretty good, the bigger pieces had bigger holes and show the lighter color more.

Below are a couple of pics of one of the boards as it sits now. I'm going to try putting them into their frames this weekend... we'll see how that goes.

Thanks again for the feedback.


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