I've been working on a cribbage board for a nightmarish amount of time. The board itself was cake -- it's the finish that's got me on the verge of... well, unpleasant things. I found my old General Finishes to have gone bad, and I tried to make it work, such as with THIS THREAD.
In any case, I went out and got a brand new can of General Finishes Arm-R-Seal Oil & Poly semi-gloss. I built up a few coats and was pretty happy with it, but in my a-retentiveness, I burned through to wood when trying to wet sand out some piece of dust or lint that I could see. Bummer. I re-scuffed the whole thing and started again. To combat dust, I started applying the finish and then putting a cardboard box over the top of my board. This worked really well to keep dust from the air off the board.
On my third coat of this... all of the sudden I got radical "veins" running all through my board. It looked like the liquid had "shriveled" up and left these monstrous protruding veins coursing around. The sides looked more like runs -- like they "sagged."
I figured that it was due to my cardboard box. I thought that without air circulation, perhaps the drying time had increased and caused something funny to happen without direct exposure to plenty of air. Who knows, though?
I tried to sand all of these flat, but it was just too much. I ended up burning through in a couple places and so I started over... again. Now I took to putting the board in the bathtub on some 1x1 slats and drawing the curtain closed. This also worked really well for dust. Well, I just did the second coat and already those veins are back!
I have no idea what would cause this!! Here are some pictures. I put black dots just below anywhere there's veins, as I have to take a picture in just the right light to capture them:
resize_veins1.jpg resize_veins2.jpg resize_veins3.jpg
The last one looks more like spots/orange peel than running veins like the other two.
Any thoughts on this? Feel free to ask for more information.
Thanks,
John
PS. I apply the finish with a folded cotton t-shirt rag. Same as I do with other things. I've used this finish on many other boards and never had this happen. I'm going to sand this one down and re-apply, leaving it in the room I always use rather than the bathroom. I'll deal with the dust somehow -- not getting finish on flat is a bigger problem than dust. I'll post back in a couple days with the results.