Pine Tar to Treat Outdoor Wood

Yesterday I cleaned our deck and treated it with pine tar. I have been “experimenting” with pine tar to preserve outdoor wood for the past 5 years or so. I put “experimenting” in quotes because so far I've done no formal trials with control groups, no measurements or postmortems, I'm just trying it out to see how it goes. So far, I think it's working very well, and I'll be trying it in different ways going forward. Click through to see some before/after pictures of our deck.

Why pine tar?

Shop Report

Here's what I have going on in the shop these days. As with anything, there's more going on than you hear about in any one place!

Here's the Shaker-inspired table we built in

Solvent and Finishing Tip

 Not much explanation required here! I'll just elaborate by saying these washers are cheap and you might think about leaving one taped to cans you use often, like alcohol and boiled linseed oil in my case. The blue masking tape is good for this.

 My photoshop skills are far from pro-level, but I can at least

Quick Finishing Tip

Just because two finishes are from the same manufacturer, and just because their labels say they are "compatible" with each other, you shouldn't

Finishing Cabinet Doors: One Quick Tip

The sooner you start finishing, the easier and neater the job will be.

Sometimes I'll put a

Backlighting Helps Prevent Finishing Flaws

No, not black light. BACK. As in, if you put a work light behind the surface you're applying finish to, at roughly the same height as your eyes or perhaps a bit lower, that light will reflect off the wet finish into your eyes, so any spot that you've missed will show up darker, and any little piece of sawdust or hair will distort the liquid surface of the finish and distort the reflection.

Try it! you'll see a difference right away.

Ebonizing Wood

One way to make your woodworking stand out is to invest some time in learning new finishing techniques. Ebonizing by the method I describe here is a great addition to the thousand-dollar shop, because it requires no special equipment or tools other than the plastic cups, gloves, rags, etc. you already have on hand.

Repair Damaged Wood with Steam from Clothes Iron

Accidents happen. A case of (literal) butterfingers could make you lose grip on your recipe box and ding the edge of the kitchen table. A perfectly respectable man can inadvertently drop one of the kitchen chairs while moving it up to the bedroom. Maybe you came in from the garage carrying a cinder block and needed to set it down quickly, not realizing until you picked it up again that in doing so you laid it on the end of the dog's leash, and now your wood floor has the perfect impression of a snap swivel right in front of the coat closet.

One approach to such mishaps is to say “Thank you! My furniture (or house) now has more patina!” Your wabi-sabi outlook on life might lead you to take this attitude, and if so that's fine. I go that way myself, quite often.

But right now, I'm making a chair, and it hasn't even had a chance to be a new chair yet, so I was dismayed to take the rear legs out of the bending jig after I steam-bent them to see this:

How did this happen? The bending jig is made of yellow pine, and its grain embossed itself onto the chair legs while they were clamped into the jig. Soon you will see a post on “Appropriate Bending Jig Materials” perhaps . . . meantime, I don't want to make two new chair legs. What to do? Bondo? That's a lot of work, and I didn't plan on painting this chair.

So I borrowed a clothes iron, got a clean rag sopping wet, and pressed the rag into the dent with the hot iron:

The Improvised Life

A couple of paragraphs I wrote a few months ago have shown up on The Improvised Life, a blog I never fail to read. Here's the link: http://www.improvisedlife.com/2013/12/03/paint-dipped-spoons-diy-buy/. Woodworking advice on a food and decor blog? That's Sally for you.

PVA Resist Finish, or "Do You Think We Can Tell the Homeowner Batik Is Coming Back?"

I found this photo a few moments ago in a folder of files from the first digital camera I owned, about 12 years ago. I'm glad I found it, as it's an excellent illustration of something I tell my students all the time:

Fortified Paint: Looks Like Sprayed Lacquer, Goes on with a Brush

Here's a wood finish that looks like a million bucks, and you can apply it with minimal equipment and materials.