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Over my career making and restoring furniture I’ve found washcoats helpful now and then when staining wood. A washcoat is a finish, any finish, thinned with two or more parts...

Am I the only person who thinks the EPA’s proposed ban on methylene chloride in paint strippers is a big and unnecessary overstep by government? Ever since the EPA announced...

You may be aware that I have a connection with Denmark. My wife is Danish, and we lived there for two years in the mid-1970s. So I guess that makes...

Those who follow this blog know that I’m pretty taken with the advances being made in paints and coatings. We might not be seeing these advances in the paint we...

I get a lot of questions about finish problems, and, as you can imagine, they are often difficult to diagnose simply from the description. In these situations, a picture can...

After my last post (April 10) about wearing gloves when spraying with a spray gun, I thought it might be appropriate to discuss aerosols as a substitute for spray guns....

I’ll probably get pushback on this, but here goes anyway. I’d love to hear your objections. Look at the above picture. What seems odd to you? It’s not something small....

A friend called with a finish question. He had just made a guitar in a guitar-making class and wanted to know the best finish for it. He began with the...

I got a question from a professional woodworker wanting to know if he could market the shellac he used as “all natural,” or if Zinsser put non-natural ingredients in their...

This is another installment in my series on smart coatings. You can access the others by typing in “smart” in the search box near the top of my main blog...

A professional woodworker got in touch with this question. He had finished a sixty-foot long countertop for a brewery tasting room with catalyzed (conversion) varnish. After the finish dried for...

In the October, 2017 issue of Popular Woodworking, page 10, I answered a question from a reader concerning how to handle paint on an exterior door that was beginning to...