Hi folks,
Long post – bear with me here.
I am about to embark on phase 2 of correcting a long standing problem. My employer has a restaurant (several, actually) that has faux antique cherry table tops – perhaps 30 of them, ranging from 24 x 36 up to 48 x 72 and 72” round. The tops are 1 ¼ solid birch or maple – not sure, as I haven’t taken any of them down to bare wood, but my guess, considering the overall quality, would be soft maple. They are then smeared with someone’s idea of an antique cherry stain, and sprayed with some cheap clear finish.
The finish began failing the first season the restaurant was open, leaving white chips, scratches along failure cracks, and other blemishes:
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Additionally, they suffer from abuse from those darling little dears of today’s negligent parents – I subject I could easily rant on in another post…….:
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I was tasked to fix this. I did the best I could with my limited finishing skills, limited shop space (with no finishing room), furniture polish silicon contamination, and limited time frame – the restaurant’s “shut-down” time. I chose to use Waterlox, thinking that it would be easier to repair again down the road than a polyurethane. My first few I tried to achieve a satin finish, following directions, but was unhappy with the results – couldn’t keep brush strokes out of the finish, so I ended up sticking with the Original formulation for all the rest. I didn’t try to strip/sand to bare wood, not being confident I could get a close enough color match to surrounding tables. Instead, I tried several different blemish repair techniques – dye markers, wax crayons, and colored lacquer, custom mixed and applied with artist’s brushes. The crayons were useless (in this application, at least), the markers were of only very limited utility, and not at all on the bare wood chips and scratches. I never got the hang of getting a good color match with the lacquer repair kit, and had to settle for “darker is better than lighter”. As for leveling the lacquer repairs, I consistently went right through them to white wood again, so I ended up leaving them proud, and running the Waterlox over them.
Other than blemish repair, I learned about solvent and detergent washes followed by shellac to combat silicon contamination, and I learned a lot about Waterlox – slow curing times, jelling in the can, etc.
Despite all my frustrations, I got through about ¾ of the tables, and some of them came out acceptably for the setting:
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Others did not:
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I am assuming that this was the result of putting the table into use before the Waterlox had time to fully cure.
The powers that be have finally, after repeating myself until I was blue in the face, come to accept that dense white wood, under a dark finish, given the usage (and ab-usage), will never stay acceptably attractive. I have been given the go ahead to do a replacement top in stained/dyed cherry (we also discussed walnut and mahogany) as a test with an eye to eventual replacement of all the tops.
Now to my questions:
1) In a commercial application such as this, would polyurethane be a better choice than varnish? Or would a different varnish be a better choice than Waterlox – Behlen’s Rock Hard, or P&L, or other? Given the abuse these tables take, repairability will still be an issue down the road – both the underlying coloration and the clear film topcoat.
2) Will a thicker film (more than 2 or 3 coats over a shellac washcoat and a probable gel stain glaze) add blemish protection, or will it just make the blemish craters that much deeper?
3) I am assuming that the cherry, once it gets scratched into the bare wood, will be easier than maple/birch to recolor to a close match – yes/no/maybe?
4) Will a strong dye, as an initial coat of color, penetrate deeply enough to help with question #3, and if so, how best to go about getting a strong dye onto a large bare cherry surface without severe blotching? I will admit to having limited success with dyes thus far……
Just for information’s sake, this is the “look” they want to maintain:
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Therefore, they don’t want to protect the tables with either glass or hide them with tablecloths.
Thanks in advance,
Bruce