Greetings everyone and thank you for welcoming me into your community. Let me start off by saying I have never worked/shaped/crafted a single piece of woodwork in my life. Looking over the various categories here I decided the Design Forum would be the best place to start. I have spent several hours reading the posts here getting ideas. Here is what I've come up with so far.
The background:
I am making a workbench for reloading. My number one priority is sturdiness. I was given some freshly sawed red oak to use for the top. I have 4 boards. Two are 7 inches wide by 72 inches long and two are 10 inches wide by 73 inches long. As the title states, these are 8/4 thick. My plan is to stain/finish them and join them to make a 30 inch by 70 inch worktop for my bench.
Currently they have a MC of 15%. The furniture in the room where they will reside is approximately 9%.
If I start now I know they will possibly cup and I may have some end splitting as they dry and draw. I will most likely let them drop another couple of percentage points to ~12%ish before I start finishing the boards.
My tentative finishing plan:
I am going to start out rough sanding the boards with possibly 80 grit or so. Once I give the boards a good going over then I plan on using Minwax wipe on stain and wet sanding with 100 or 120 grit to fill the grain. (Gunstock is the color I chose of course ) Once I get a good slurry and fill the grain I'll apply a final stain and then use a wipe on poly (sanding to a finer finish as I go) to finish the boards to give it a little bit of durability. Note I'm allowing each step the recommended drying time for that particular stage.
At this point I hope to have 4 fairly durable boards stained a nice Gunstock color.
Edge joining the boards:
I have read several topics about trying to join boards with too high a MC. I came up with a couple of wild ideas to possibly compensate for this. Since I don't have the means or the patience (mostly patience) to wait months for the MC to drop below 10, I decided to try a non glue approach to joining the boards. Ideas I'm bouncing around are dry doweling and even using the countertop style of draw bolting underneath to hold them 'mostly' together. I thought maybe with an adjustable join I could allow for drawing and 'tighten' as needed to keep any obvious cracks from appearing in my top joins. I know, the artisans out there are cringing after reading that last sentence lol.
Mostly I wanted to know if I had the stages for finishing in the right order: rough sand; wet sand with stain to fill the grain - this may take a few coats;(I chose Minwax wipe on stain. I would have chosen Watco danish oil here but am trying to combat the excessively long bleeding times) final stain and sand with much finer sand paper (also a few coats); wipe on poly, (minwax wipe on poly satin finish) fine sanding between coats - 3 to 5 coats to build up a durable top layer.
Once I have the boards in the condition I want then I'll join and secure to the workbench base.
Any and all constructive criticism is welcome.
Sincerely
JP