Achieving a Silky Smooth Finish
George VondriskaHow do you get a super smooth finish on your projects? First, by understanding the physics of what makes a smooth finish. When light hits your project it will “fall” into any depressions that you have in the material. This doesn’t necessarily mean you have defects in the wood. It’s simply the nature of wood. It has grain, and the grain naturally has high and low spots. Rob does a great job in this video showing us how grain and light interact.
Finish alone won’t do it
Finish isn’t a filler. It may make the surface look smooth and flat initially, but over time you’ll still have highs and lows.
The answer is??
The solution for this problem is using products that are specifically designed to be grain fillers. One example is Aquacoat Grain Filler. Learn more about it in this video.
Woodworkers are regularly asking how do you get a super smooth, super shiny finish, you know, like on a guitar or something. It's really not that hard, but you need to know the physics of what's going on. Basically when light bounces across a surface, you're gonna pick up any distortions or poles or pores, and that's what brings down the gloss of a finish. So if you're finishing wood, you need to. Finish it in such a way that uh that that's super smooth and how do you do that?
Well, let's imagine that this is a piece of wood and it's kind of microscopic so I, I cut these grooves in here to represent the pores of a piece of wood. OK? So here we are first, you can see the pores are, are, you know. Very developed and obviously if we put a finish on that it would look rough. So what do we do next?
We, of course, sand to the surface. To get a, a good smooth finish, you need to really sand smooth. I like to go up to 400 or even 600 grits sometimes. When you do that, you get a nice smooth surface, and then, You apply your finish, but guess what? You still got your pores, your divots, your dents, and the light glancing across it will, will pick those up.
So you need to fill it with something that'll, you can completely smooth it off. So you're thinking to yourself, why don't I just. Fill full of polyurethane or a lacquer and that'll work for a little bit, but what happens is the volatiles in those mixtures will start to evaporate and all of a sudden your hidden pores will be revealed once again. So you need to use something that's uh, it fills the pores but stays rigid and so that's where things like this aquacote or fill and finish, which is a CA glue designed for this kind of thing. You put those into the pores, you let it cure, you sand it, you look across a raking light, see if you need more of it, put more in, sand it and once you get that surface smooth, super smooth.
Then You can put your finish on it and you have a super smooth, highly, highly reflective surface that will be shiny as plastic, not hard, you just need to follow the steps.
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