Spraying Target USL with Wagner Conv. Gun

[Chris Merriam]

Another update, to my newbie eye the dried first coat looked great! No bare spots, no orange peel but hard to tell with the open pores of the mahogany. (I'm filling them with the finish)

I dialed the gun pressure down to 9-10 with the trigger pulled, gave a nice even dispersion on the "shoot at cardboard drip test".

Second coat went on very well, though again I didn't do a cross hatch on flat surfaces, and I moved the gun quite fast. Probably covered my 22 inch door in 1-1.25 seconds, but that's all it took to get even coverage.

Also, just remembered, probably another contributor to my previous poor results, I had a coat of BLO on there, and I probably didn't give it enough time to dry and I put the USL right on top if it. This time I put some amber shellac down first, and I also gave the BLO over 24 hours to dry.

I will take some "2nd coat dried" and "3rd coat wet" pictures in an hour and post them.

[Chris Merriam]

Here's some pics of the 2nd coat dry. Took some of the third wet but they came out blurry.

You can see I haven't filled the pores. I'm just going to keep hitting it with the finish til it gets fairly smooth. I've never used grain filler before, not ready to attempt two new things at once.

[Jim Becker]

I'm thinking that you're getting it on a little thick. It doesn't appear to be leveling out. How many turns of the fluid (needle) adjustment are you using? (I generally use 1.5 to 1.25 turns...I put a black line on the knob to make it easy to visually adjust)

[Chris Merriam]

yep, I agree it's on the thick side. I started at 1.5 turns and dialed down to 1.25 or so. It's much better than what I was getting before. Maybe I'll try a bit less, it's just to my inexperienced eye the coat looked a little dry when I went lower.

[Conrad Fiore]

Chris,
Something to think about with regards to filling the grain with USL. At some point after you get a number of coats on, you may notice that the grain is not filling as you anticipated it would. Without using a grain filler, you might have to do some sanding to level the finish back down to the "filled grain" level so that you can spray a level coat. I don't know how much grain you actually want to fill, but if you are looking for glass smooth, sanding will be in order.

[Chris Merriam]

Thanks Conrad, I was beginning to suspect the same thing. Will probably hit it with some sandpaper today and see how it goes. I just put a fourth coat on and didn't notice much difference in the grain-filling.

[Jim Becker]

If you sand to level, it should be with a sanding block, not a ROS. Powered sanding for this purpose will tend to uneven results and good risk of sand-through near the edges.