Phoenix Furniture
Rescued - Reimagined - Reborn
Finish Perfection for Less - Wipe-on Poly Made Cheap & Easy
You’re nearing the finish line. You stripped your precious furniture piece, sanded it smooth, and applied your stain. It looks beautiful! (Do you like how I reduced hours and hours and hours of work into one little sentence?) Now you need to protect all of that hard work and the beautiful wood with a topcoat that will both enhance the beauty and protect it from harm as it takes its place in your home. But what should you choose?
Go into the stain and varnish aisle in any hardware store and you are inundated with choices! There are multiple brands, different lines within each brand, and last, but not least, sheen choices within each line. How are you supposed to know what is right for your piece? When I was in that position, I had a heart to heart chat with Bob. (Name changed for his privacy, but a real person at my local Home Depot paint department. 🙂 ) Bob has years and years of experience in refinishing furniture, and is always happy to point me in the direction of something he thinks might be helpful. And best of all, he tells me WHY he thinks it will help me. Teaching me how to fish, so to speak. That way I know when/if it would help me down the line on another project.
It was Bob who taught me the secret of mixing your own wipe-on polyurethane to get the perfect finish for much less money. Wipe-on poly is available pre-mixed. There are several brands to choose from, at various price points. But all are VERY expensive compared to their brush-on cousins. Why use a wipe-on? Let me count the ways!
- No brush strokes! Wipe on is just what it sounds like, a polyurethane you apply with a (lint-free) cloth. No brush = no brush marks in your finish. Yay!
No drips! If you resist the urge to put lots and lots on with each coat, you don’t have to worry about drips – a constant concern with brushed-on products, especially around carvings and other fine detail work. The way Bob described it is this: Pretend you’re wiping down a kitchen table. You don’t want the rag to be dripping all over. After wiping down the table top, it’s going to be shiny, but there are no puddles.
Sanding is not strictly necessary. With brush-on products you need to sand between coats to ensure proper adhesion. That’s not the case with wipe-on. Bob was quite excited about this point. The man HATES sanding! BUT, as much as I’m not a lover of the sandpaper, I AM a lover of a silky-smooth finish. I’m a very tactile person, and I love the feel of perfectly finished wood as much as I do the look of it. So I DO sand, but not between each coat. More about that below.
Although you need more coats with the wipe-on because they are thinner, they also dry more quickly. You can usually ( Allowing for variations in heat and humidity ) apply the next coat in 2 – 3 hours. Application is also very quick, without the constant need to go back to make sure I catch any drips (Because I DIDN’T put lots and lots on! Hint! Hint! 🙂 ). The net result is that I’ve found that I actually get through the whole process of top-coating much more quickly.
“Okay, Erin, you’ve convinced me! Wipe-on is the way to go! Now what?” I’m so glad you asked! 🙂
The recipe is simple: Mix 50/50 mineral spirits and polyurethane. Easy-peasy! I sometimes end up a little closer to a 40/60 or 35/65 mix. I’m not being super-precise as I dump the two parts into the container. You can mix just what you think you’ll need for the project you’re working on. That’s how I started. I used washed-out egg drop soup containers, which kept it fresh long enough to finish up most projects. It wasn’t a good enough seal to be able to save it for much longer though. I hated wasting product when I overestimated what I would need. And no matter how much plastic wrap I used, and other additions I made to my egg drop soup container, the mixture always hardened before I had another use for it. I would try to avoid the situation by mixing less. But then I found myself frustrated and delayed when I ran out BEFORE I was done, and had to stop to mix more. Which then was usually too much . . . you get the idea.
Enter metal “paint” cans and lids from Lowes and Home Depot that seal just as nicely as anything you buy your paints and stains in. For just $3 I could save time overall by mixing a full quart of my wipe-on poly, AND to stop the excessive waste! (There are also gallon-sized cans, but that seemed excessive for my needs. 😉 ) Just as with any other product, you need to stir thoroughly before each use, especially if it has been on the shelf for a while.
Remember that buttery-smooth finish I mentioned loving? To get that with wipe-on poly, every 3rd coat I let dry a bit more thoroughly, closer to 3 hours than 2. Then I give it a VERY light sanding (Sorry, Bob!) with 300+ grit sandpaper to remove any dust, lint, bugs, etc. It doesn’t have to be as heavy a sanding as with brush-on products because the dry time is so fast there isn’t as much time for anything to land in the wet product. And the sanding isn’t necessary for adhesion with a wipe-on. Make sure to thoroughly remove all of the dust before you put on the next coat of poly.
Generally I do 5 – 7 coats (depending on how close to an actual 50/50 mix this batch is) to be equal to the normal 2 – 3 with brush-on products. I always do the light sanding before the final coat. It ensures everything is still super smooth!
“Erin, you said not to put on lots, and I did anyway. I couldn’t help myself! And now I have drips!” Oh, Friend! I have BEEN there! No worries! Sandpaper to the rescue! Be careful not to sand all the way through the topcoat when you sand out the drips. It may mean adding extra coats of poly until the sanded area disappears.
There you have it! Finish perfection every time!
NOTE: After I published this blog post, I ran out of my latest batch of wipe-on poly. My closest store didn’t carry Minwax brand products, which is what I had always used for my wipe-on mixture. They DID carry Varathane products. I’ve used their stains with great success, so I figured that for wipe-on poly it would be six of one, half a dozen of the other in terms of which brand to use. WRONG!! Long story short: no matter how much mineral spirits I added, I could NOT get it to a point where the wipe-on could actually be, well, wiped on. 🙁 Every time I tried I ended up with splotches and drag marks all over. I ended up having to sand everything back down almost to the bare wood and start over. I went and bought my usual Minwax brand, mixed it up as I described above, and it was beautiful! For whatever reason, Varathane brand just didn’t work for me for this application.
See the results for yourself! Check out these projects where I put these finish perfection techniques to use: