Help, advice and whatever else you can offer

[Woodworks]

Lovely work Lazarus 

 

 

 

No magic to sanding. Start off with course grits (80-100) if major marks to remove. Then move up a grade say 150 and be very careful to remove all the courser scratches before going on to finer grades like 240 grit etc. If machine sanding belt sanders are great for fast wood removal but so easy to leave digs from the side of the belt. Random orbit sanders are your friend for this sort of work and the advise on grits is the same. Nothing worse than putting on your first coat of finish and then spotting some course abrasive scratches that you failed to remove. . If you good with hand tools do as much as you can with a sharp plane before commencing sanding being careful to plane towards the centre when doing the edge. If you plane outwards over the edge on end grain it's highly likely to spelch ie split the grain.

 

 

 Finishes to bring out the depth of colour

 

Linseed oil.

Fantastic colour but very slow drying. Old saying was 1 coat each day for a week, once a week for a month and then once a month for year. Boiled Linseed dries faster but does not give quite the depth of colour. First coats need to be thinned to aid there penetration into the grain.

 

Both Danish oil and Liberon finishing oil are pretty good and you can have nice finish in week.

 

Oil based varnishes can be pretty good as well. Only recently learned there is not much difference between these and drying oils like Danish just the amount of driers added to them make them go off quickly. Look up "wiping varnishes" if interested in this.

[Lazurus]

Cannot take credit for that one its a Google image. lol...... 

[Martin du Preez]

Lovely work Lazarus 
 
 
 
No magic to sanding. Start off with course grits (80-100) if major marks to remove. Then move up a grade say 150 and be very careful to remove all the courser scratches before going on to finer grades like 240 grit etc. If machine sanding belt sanders are great for fast wood removal but so easy to leave digs from the side of the belt. Random orbit sanders are your friend for this sort of work and the advise on grits is the same. Nothing worse than putting on your first coat of finish and then spotting some course abrasive scratches that you failed to remove. . If you good with hand tools do as much as you can with a sharp plane before commencing sanding being careful to plane towards the centre when doing the edge. If you plane outwards over the edge on end grain it's highly likely to spelch ie split the grain.
 
 
 Finishes to bring out the depth of colour
 
Linseed oil.
Fantastic colour but very slow drying. Old saying was 1 coat each day for a week, once a week for a month and then once a month for year. Boiled Linseed dries faster but does not give quite the depth of colour. First coats need to be thinned to aid there penetration into the grain.
 
Both Danish oil and Liberon finishing oil are pretty good and you can have nice finish in week.
 
Oil based varnishes can be pretty good as well. Only recently learned there is not much difference between these and drying oils like Danish just the amount of driers added to them make them go off quickly. Look up "wiping varnishes" if interested in this.

Cheers buddy pretty much everything I wanted to know ! I'm pretty good with hand tools so I'm gunna give it a shot just gotta go fell this dead monster then crack on!