Well today I had to clean up a mess on a perfectly good bow. I have a combo of rosewood and curly maple on this baby I’m trying to get finished and decided to use a product specially designed for popping the grain figure in curly maple.
So after all the finish sanding was done I wiped down the whole bow with this stuff so I would get the overlays and limb edges all evenly colored…..At first it didn’t seem to do anything….So I wiped on a second coat, and went in the house to get me another cup of Joe….. By the time I got back to the shop… the whole bow had turned black.
You could barely see the grain in the rosewood and the maple was seriously dark…… I just about puked…. What happened?
So I spent two hours carefully sanding the stuff off after it had dried completely and decided to go a different route. So I got out some golden oak stain I’d used in th3 past to darken up the maple a bit, and didn’t effect the rosewood at all…. Great! Looked beautiful! I decided to let the stain dry over night before clear coating, which is always a good thing to do.
So this morning I head back to the shop thinking I’d be spraying first thing only to find that the stain didn’t dry completely……
Now I’m getting a little bent out of shape here… this dad burn bow refuses to give me a break and relent to getting finished….. So I’m thinking about what is the best step going forward here. I know better than introducing a solvent into the mix, but I’ve got extra stain that is like a sticky film in spots all over the whole bow.
So I ended up getting a bunch of clean rags of different consistency first. Some sweat shirt material, some old long John material, and some other stuff very soft like micro fiber cloth. I approached this mess like sanding and started with coarse cloth to remove the excess, then slowly polished it out with finer cloth by hand. I’m talking two hours of hand rubbed polishing to get it looking good and finally dry to to the touch again…..
At this point I’m spooked about spraying clear coating at all, and half tempted to just let it dry another day and use furniture polish on it….but….those type finishes just don’t hold up well over time without a lot of maintenance. So I decided to just hang it in the spray booth leave the lights on and let it cure at 90 degrees over night, and spray it tomorrow…..
You think I would learn to leave staining alone when it comes to these bows. I swore years ago I’d never stain another riser after a similar nightmare occurred by trying to touch sand between coats of clear and went through the stain… That was a whole different nightmare there I won’t go into…
Moral of story here guys…..If you ever feel the urge to stain your riser and limb edges, immediately leave the building, go fishing, or shoot your bow until you get that stupid notion out of your head. Save yourself some grief…. Kirk
Topic: 2024 What did you do today (Read 35504 times)
