How to Refinish Old Wood

Video Transcript

"Hi, I'm Tim Gipson, I'm going to talk to you about how to refinish old wood. In this case we got a old rocker here that has- it's made with solid hardwood, but the finish has aged on it. It's got some kind of a shellac or a varnish on it that has been aged. So really to refresh this and make it look, well pretty much like new, the approach that we would take on this would be to spray this with a heavy duty varnish or paint remover and then to scrape and wipe this down. What that's going to do, it's going to take all the old varnish off and also work to break down some of the aged stain that's actually in there so that we can actually open up and reveal a lot more of the grain. Once we do that, we'll need to come back, this has aged over a period of time and there are some cracks in here, so we'll have to come back with actually a crack pillar. Now a good way to do this, and to make sure you fill any cracks or scratches, but be able to keep it uniform, is to use either shellac sticks such as this which you ca match to the color. And these are actually used with a hot iron that you would heat the iron just to a hot temp and touch it to the shellac and use it to fill in cracks. But it allows you to match the color of whatever stain you have so that you don't get any inconsistencies in that. Now another way you can do for lighter scratches is you can actually melt bees wax into it and sand that down. But with some stripping and then some light sanding and then coming back with a nice either urethane or a shellac finish would really bring some life and bring the natural grain of this old piece of furniture, it would really make it look nice. So I'm Tim Gipson with some tips on how to refinish old wood."