Reply To: Starting projects of an absolute beginner
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The only thing better than testing finish on scrap is testing it on your piece. Huh? What? The idea is that there is so much variation piece to piece or even within a piece that you can fool yourself working on scraps. So, one trick, which I learned from my finishing teacher (Charles Neil) is to test your finish while you are are surfacing your rough wood. You skim just enough from the rough timber to apply some color and experiment. You want to be fat enough that planing down to dimension will remove your experiments, and you must be aware that some colors do penetrate, especially in figured wood. Being aware of using a equalizing color coat can help.
Another thing to be aware of is that color changes the way we see the wood. Curly maple is a great example. The curl comes from blotching and often becomes the dominant figure, hiding the figure from the growth rings. Also, some wood looks different from different angles and this is heightened when color is added. This is why bookmatching sometimes doesn’t work and you end up with one half of the panel looking darker than the other half…but if you rotate one side 180 degrees (undoing the bookmatch and producing what some call a slip-match) will even out the darkness. The point is that sometimes one even applies color via a dye on a shaped or planed piece to be absolutely sure what the figure will look like in the final piece. This requires knowing about what Charles calls “trace coats” which are very pale, light dye coats that are intended to be sanded or scraped off. (Sometimes you cannot use them no matter what, though).
So, yes, test on scrap, but there are other tricks, too. Bottom line….start playing with finishing and gluing as soon as possible.