Sanding Wood Furniture

Series Summary

Creating a finish on wood furniture that has a beautiful depth of color and polished shine is not easy. It takes many steps and a lot of elbow grease. The product however is worth the work. Wood such as mahogany requires filler to flatten out the surface so that it can be stained, lacquered, and polished flat. Applying many layers gives depth to the finish and polishing with steel wool creates a hand rubbed effect that few are willing to achieve.

Refinishing your wood furniture can restore the beauty of an original finish or produce a finish that is even more spectacular than the first. Expert antiques restorer Curtis W. Martin excels at producing wood furniture with an incredible depth of color, a hand rubbed effect, and a polished finish. In this free video series Curtis will show you how you can achieve a masterpiece finish on your wood furniture. Following Curtis's series of steps including sanding the wood furniture, applying grain filler, staining the wood, applying lacquer and wood polish you can refinish your worn out wood furniture to produce a finish with a depth and richness of color your furniture may never have had.

Video Transcript

"What we're going to do now is apply finish to this piece of plywood. This is a piece of mahogany plywood. It's a very porous grain wood. Porous grain wood is not unlike the one we do on the lathe. It is any kind of grain that is very open, like walnut, mahogany, oak, ash, chestnut; things like that. There are very big pores in it, and when you apply finish, the finish sinks down into the pores, and leaves a real grainy effect on the surface. One way we're going to avoid that is to start the process by sanding this with real smooth sandpaper, and cleaning the surface. We're going to put on here, 220 grit sandpaper. Now we want to get the pores clean, so we're going to put a little air pressure on it, and blow out the pores. Now we've got it real smooth and slick, and that's the basis we want to start with any kind of a foundation of a finish. You want it to be nice and smooth, sanded and clean, ready to go to start your finishing process, and that will be the next procedure."