Sealing with shellac.

Since I will apply a water-based clear poly, I have to seal the stained wood to avoid stain smearing poly and making a mess. After doing some research, I have decided to use a dewaxed shellac sealer.

This natural product has many advantages:

• Inexpensive when bought in flakes
• Durable (you just mix the quantity you need, the dry flakes can be stored forever)
• Non toxic, it's just alcohol and "bug resin", it's actually edible !
• Easy to apply
• Warms up the color tone (water-based poly is very "white")
• Has some grain filling properties

As recommended by this webpage, I made a bottle of 2 pound-cut (two pounds of flakes to one gallon of alcohol ratio) shellac, it's the regular mix. Converted in metric system:

• 3785 ml of alcohol (one gallon) with 907 grams (2 pounds) of shellac
• 417 ml of alcohol with 100 grams of shellac

They recommend a 3 pound cut for sealing stain and filling grain, but I prefer to work with several thin coats for more control.

Preparing is pretty simple, it's basically pouring alcohol into the container, adding the flakes and putting the container in hot water, stirring occasionally.

After letting it sit overnight, it's now perfectly mixed, with no flakes remaining

Took this picture later, I've used already 50%.

It makes you ca. 485 ml (16.4 fl. oz) of shellac, should be enough for a couple of coats. I paid 6,2 euros for shellac and 2 euros for denatured alcohol. As I said, cheap.
Important notice: shellac goes bad after some time, it won't dry hard, rather gummy. So don't mix too much at once, and make it just before starting to work.

I applied the first coat of shellac using a flat brush. It's easy to apply because shellac isn't very thick and flows easily.

And the effect is wow. It really brings out the stained wood tone, adding some depth to it.

But let's be honest, there's an issue on curved surfaces, like a drum shell. If you apply a little too much and that it starts dripping down, the dripping marks will cure hard in a minute. That's what happened here and there.

I had to sand them off using 400 grit with water.

Bottom-right, you see the sanded area.

Buy the way, this step of the process proves that shellac really acts like a sealer, and sanding with water had little effect on stained wood. So I gave it a go and re-sanded lightly all the shells.

At some point, you might think that you screwed up your work. Sanding paste turns green, ouch, what am I doing? But giving up is no option.

After cleaning up "the mess", I crossed my fingers and brushed on a second coat, trying this time not to apply too much.

It went better - and apparently no faded spots due to sanding - but couldn't avoid build-up marks. Shellac dries that fast. Again, some local sanding and some cold sweat. I even had to re-stain lightly the spots where I sanded through the shellac and took off some of the stain. Brr. No pictures, sorry... 

At this point, I had to think it over. Building up thicker layers of shellac sounds good, but avoiding dripping or overlapping marks is very hard. I definitely have to find a more controllable way to apply shellac and avoid excessive sanding. Read on the next article my experiments with what I will call half baked French polishing.

Some late night tryout of what looks like the right thing to do

Fauxing and fixing.

A few words on fixing lighter spots, blending wood patches, messing around with creative techniques...

When staining was done - 2 passes with intermediate sanding - the surface showed flaws here and there that needed to get fixed. I could have left it as it was, but see it like some kind of restoration laboratory.

1. Making it darker

I used some CLOU stain and black artist acrylic, mixed together to get a slightly darker green. The main difference is that thanks to acrylic paint, it sticks better.

Applied with a small point brush, it helps you:
- Covering unstained spots caused by wood paste, as I wrote earlier, made with too much binder
- Adding "faux figuring" on wood patches or where staining failed or wasn't even

One golden rule: be subtle and work with thin layers, with very little paint.

 

Here I redrawed the wood figuring. You'll notice cross grain sanding marks. They were made by one of the previous owners, probably when rewrapping. I tried to sand them off, but wasn't able to remove them without damaging the outer ply. I'll try to fix that afterwards.

2.Making it lighter

Two different methods: sand it very lightly with 400 grit, till wood begins to show through. Or use clean water and remove stain progressively.

Some tryout on the test shell

 3. Blending

Most fixed areas can be blended together sanding it lightly with 400 or with scotchbrite pad, depending on the desired effect.

It's always hard to tell the border between underdoing it or overdoing it, but I guess I did my best.

Staining. Continued.

I guess that something in the back of my mind told me that one step staining sounded too easy. So I gave it a thought.

After inspecting the stained shells, I noticed that they lost the smoothness of the 180 grit sanding. The fibers raised back when applying stain. Makes sense, it's basically water. Given the wood surface will get some sealer coats before poly - and that sealer won't work on a grainy surface - I have to get back to a smooth finish.

Hard to see on the picture, but it's not smooth at all

So I put the test shell back on the working rack to try something.

First of all, I sanded the stained surface with 240 grit. Seems to work, it does make the stain fade slightly, but it looks alright. The wood is now smooth again.

I cleaned the sanding dust using naphta since it doesn't dissolve stain (like water would).

I then applied a light coat of stain, using the sponge, in the direction of the grain, trying to blend properly.

Before that last buffing, I also did some faux figuring job, read it under the related article.

When done, I buffed the surface with a fine scotchbrite pad. The finish is now smooth, perfect for applying sealer.

Again, hard to guess on the picture, but way smoother

It actually had little impact on the stain tone, I have the feeling it makes it a little more even, but it's very subtle.

 Underneath the finished sample. The overall tone is the same, but more even.

On the 13" tom-tom and on the 16" floortom, buffing with scotchbrite feels enough. On the bassdrum though, the outside ply is grainier, the coarser spots must be sanded carefully - otherwise the thin layer of stained wood will be damaged - using 400 grit.

Here's a good idea of what the stained wood figuring looks like.

Things I learned from this work:

• Sponge works fine. At 8 cents a piece.
• I mixed way too much stain. I used something like 100 ml for 2 square meters. Literature on the internet says 150 ml per square meter, which is totally wrong, unless you soak it completely.
• I get whiter spots where I applied the woodpaste made with more - too much - binder. My bad.
• CLOU stain is very controllable. I had stain dripping but I managed to blend it afterwards by rubbing the sponge.
• No need to fill the mounting holes since the sponge method refrains you from using too much stain