Furniture Finishing & Restoration

Finishing Cherry

"Lacquer & Shellac - Page 3"

Of the film forming finishes, Lacquer and shellac have excellent optical clarity and are the top choices when you want the best "lens" on the wood. Lacquer naturally has a very light amber color, blonde shellac has a little more coloring, and other grades of shellac have even more natural color. At the very top of this sample, there is a couple coats of lacquer alone. In the middle section, there's a coat of garnet shellac before the lacquer was applied, and on the lower section, there's two coats of garnet shellac under the lacquer. This type of garnet shellac has a pretty strong yellow tone to it, though other types of garnet are more reddish brown. Using a finish with color in it, whether it's one of the grades of shellac with natural coloring, or a finish with some dye in it, gives the wood a greater appearance of depth. The colored "lens" over the wood is the reason for the improved look of depth.

This cherry sample has a lacquer only finish but looks a little "blotchy" from some angles. On some cherry boards, even a non-penetrating film forming finish like lacquer or shellac has the look sometimes. After planing cherry, you can see the areas of the wood that look darker than the surrounding wood. These are the areas that will look blotchy or mottled once the finish is applied.

Curly cherry has repetitive bands, stripes, and spots of wavy grain that show up looking darker than the surrounding grain. Because the darker areas are repetitive, they look a lot more natural than the random spots that's common in a lot of "straight" grained cherry. So no matter what you put on it, curly cherry has a "blotchy" appearance due to the grain direction changes in the wood. While lacquer and shellac keep blotching to a minumum, the resulting look on curly cherry isn't all that "lively." Instead, it's more a muted look than some of the alternatives; not quite the striking impact the wood is capable of producing.

Here's the same sample with angled lighting to bring out the depth and shimmer in the wood. In person, it looks better than the picture as most of these samples do; photography is a lot more limited than the human eye. With the angled lighting, the lacquer alone looks pretty nice. But when you put a lacquer only sample next to one that designed to really "pop" the figure, the lacquer sample looks boring in comparison! In the next section, there's a sample that uses drying oil on the bare wood before the clear coat finish is applied and you can see a big difference. Later on, there's some samples with other ways to get that figure to "POP!"

NEXT: Oils & Oil Finishes