finish for red oak accessory table

[AlanJ]

If you use wipe-on poly you really won't have long to wait before it's dry enough to turn over - so do one side and go and have a coffee. When you come back it will be dry enough.

[Jeffrey Schronce]

Red Oak looks nice unstained. It also takes stain well so that is your call. Red Oak is pretty wide grained and some folks choose to fill the grain. If this is your first, filling the grain will be beyond what you want to do.
Home Depot has wider variety of Minwax products while Lowes offers some Minwax and a large selection of (i think) Olympic.
Using a nice hard wood like red oak I would stick with a basic oil based Minwax stain. I have used Minwax Golden Oak to a point I am very tired of it and now find myself adding a layer of Cherrywood Gel stain to give it a little more flavor.
As for finish, the wipe of poly you picked is just fine. You will find that Matte or Semi Gloss is more forgiving than Gloss, but wipe on is pretty easy no matter the luster.
After you burn through that little can of wipe on poly you will want to start making your own. It is much, much cheaper and you can determine the characteristics you want in the finish.
Get a gallon of poly, gallon of Naptha, and a gallon of boiled linseed oil.
You can mix these to meet a lot of your finishing needs:
Use the Poly straight out of the can. - Slow Drying applied by brush.
Mix Poly and Naptha 50/50 for a decent quick drying wipe on.
Mix Poly, Naptha and Linseed Oil 40/40/20 for nice luster wipe on poly.
Naptha can be used for brush cleaning or other clean up.
Mix Poly and Naptha 25/75 for a good sanding sealer.
Use boiled linseed oil straight on a highly figured wood that doesnt need a lot of water/alchol protection.
Wipe Naptha directly onto unfinished wood to show any potential problems in sanding, absorbtion, etc.
Use 90% naptha and 10% linseed oil as a wipe on pre-stain finish to eleminate blotches.

Good beginner finish is also Shellac. If you buy shellac in the stores remember you will need to add Denatured Alcohol to get the appropriate "Cut" of shellac. Check out shellac.net for more info.

Final suggestion is get Great Wood Finishes by Jeff Jewit book from Amazon (or see if it is in your local library). Once you are getting along well but still making a few mistakes that you can't quite seem to get right, then get Understanding Wood Finishing by Bob Flexner.

[wreckwriter]

Thanks for the detailed explanations and tips! I'll let you know how it turns out.

[RickCarpenter]

As it happens, I'm building an extension wing myself, and plan to finish it the same as my torsion box assembly table, which uses red oak trim around all four sides:

So how is the base constructed? Looks like maybe I-beams connected via a central stabilizer?

Rick

[LarryG]

So how is the base constructed? Looks like maybe I-beams connected via a central stabilizer?

Exactly right. The base is crude, a quick-and-dirty construct, but it works. Each leg is a rectangle of 1/2" MDF, sandwiched between a pair of 2x4s at the top and bottom. They're connected by a larger rectangle of MDF, held in place by cleats; I think I also used 1/2" MDF for this panel but it might be 3/4". There are some small locator blocks tacked to the bottom-side skin of the torsion box to keep it from sliding around on the base.

[RickCarpenter]

Exactly right. The base is crude, a quick-and-dirty construct, but it works. Each leg is a rectangle of 1/2" MDF, sandwiched between a pair of 2x4s at the top and bottom. They're connected by a larger rectangle of MDF, held in place by cleats; I think I also used 1/2" MDF for this panel but it might be 3/4". There are some small locator blocks tacked to the bottom-side skin of the torsion box to keep it from sliding around on the base.

OK, 42x60x18, does it knock down? Has the low height ever caused a real problem? From the thread, I gather your shop space is small. I need to build one similar size, but I think I could build the same type of base except with the middle connector made of two pipes with large flanges and some sort of wingnuts to knock it down for vertical storage. The funny people at my house think a garage is for cars and golf carts, so I only have my little corner...

Rick

[LarryG]

Rick,

My assembly table does not "knock down" per se. The torsion box can be lifted off the base if need be, since it is not permanently attached, but this is not something you'd want to do regularly. The thing is heavy: I'd guess well in excess of 100 lbs, even for the relatively small 42" x 60" size. Even worse than the weight is the fact it's cumbersome: it's big, and everything is smooth so there's no way to get a good grip.

I suppose you could attach handles to the sides but you would want to have help moving it around ... I'm six feet and 200+ lbs and my table is much more than I can comfortably handle alone. Even wrestling it up onto its base was about all I could manage without it getting away from me.

Alternatively, you might hinge one end to a wall. As the picture shows, my table is snuggled up against my clamp rack at one end, providing access to only three sides. Obviously clear access to all four sides would be preferable but I can't say that having this one end blocked has been a hardship. But the weight issue remains so you'd need stout hinges, and could count on loosing a few hearty grunts every time you folded it up or down.

The low height works out better than one might think. The small size of my shop did influence this decision, for two reasons:

One, I've only got a tick more than six feet of headroom under the roof collar ties, one of which runs over the middle of the table. Placing the top at 18" AFF gives me 54" of vertical clearance for a project, which means I have just enough room to build, say, a 4' high bookcase. That's pretty tight. Even for something like a 36" base cabinet, there's room to operate a plunge router up top but not much more.

Two, the floor space is also very limited. The picture doesn't make clear that there is less than two feet of clearance to the pipe clamp rack at the rear, about the same amount to the workbench that's just out of the frame to the left, and right at three feet to my BT3100, out of frame in the foreground. In planning the table, I was smart enough to realize that an object located down around knee level is effectively more out of the way than if it were up at waist level, because your legs are a lot smaller, individually, than your torso. If the table's top was higher, I'd have had to made it at least 6" smaller in both directions, and even then I'd be running into it all the time. Placing it down low made it possible to make it much larger than it otherwise could have been (and, of course, gave me some much-needed vertical clearance too).

I'm 53 and have the usual assortment of aches and pains that advancing years brings, so working off an 18" platform sometimes makes my back a bit stiff. I have a folding chair (steel, card-table type) in the shop and try to sit in it as much as possible. But it's interesting to note that if I was going to raise my table up any, it wouldn't be much. Watching WoodWorks on TV, my best guess is that David Marks has the top of his at about 24" AFF, or maybe 26" ... it appears to be lower than desk height (29"-30") and it's certainly lower than workbench/counter height (34"-36"). For an assembly table, the lower height is what you want. You're not lifting heavy assemblies up as high, and a larger percentage of the project is at a comfortable level. (If you watch NYW, you'll see that when Norm builds something atop his taller assembly table, he's frequently reaching well above his head.)

A long answer to a couple simple questions, but I wanted to be complete. If there's anything else, holler back again.

[wreckwriter]

Well, I've got 2 coats on it. Its looking good. Will decide tonight wether to go with a third coat or call it finished. Thanks for all the tips!

[Jeffrey Schronce]

I believe you went with a high gloss finish. If hi gloss with a "deep" look is your intention, more coats would be warrented. This is what is known as your "build". A two layer build of wipe on poly is not a lot, as one has to remember how much the poly has been thinned with wipe on poly.
However, if YOU are HAPPY with it as it, then by all means you are done!

[wreckwriter]

I believe you went with a high gloss finish. If hi gloss with a "deep" look is your intention, more coats would be warrented. This is what is known as your "build". A two layer build of wipe on poly is not a lot, as one has to remember how much the poly has been thinned with wipe on poly.
However, if YOU are HAPPY with it as it, then by all means you are done!

My intention was really just to put a functional finish on it, something that could be waxed slick. Its looking fairly deep as of this morning though. When I get home I'll take it out in the sun and see how it looks.

[Jeffrey Schronce]

Oh, ya kind of forgot this is a shop related project. Wax it and move on.

Also, reading the discussion of General Finishes, while I would rather formulate my own finishes, I really do like General Finishes Gel Stain. It is certainly best of class and the thickest Gel Stain I have come across. As usual, it is expensive, but if you have a demanding piece that needs uniform coverage, this stuff rocks. I personally prefer regular oil stains or solvent based dyes, but on hard to stain projects GF's Gel Stain is great. Also great for refinishing and restoration work due to the range of gel stains availiable.

[wreckwriter]

Yea, I have to get on the back porch project hard this weekend so chances are good the table is finished. Its possible I'll end up redoing this little table someday as I plan to build an outfeed table and a wide table too and I won't be able to get bigger pieces of oak here, might end up redoing this one is whatever I do the others in. Gotta match ya know Another option would be to try to stain the others to match this one... Oh well, those are projects for another weekend..