I recently completed a desk for my 1st grade son. Here’s a pic for reference.
burnish desk.jpg
Before this I had made a somewhat similarly styled end table that, until now, had been my nicest and largest piece of furniture. Part of this project was trying out burnishing techniques to see what kind of improvements I could make (among many other improvements I wanted to make; some successfully, some not so much!).
One of the problems I had on the earlier project with the legs was dealing with exposed grain during finishing – it was very hard to not have end grain grab at the finishing cloth. My lathe is a pole lathe and getting super smooth surfaces is not quite as easy as with a power lathe spinning at 3000+ RPM (or so I’m told; I have no experience with a power lathe). It’s standard operating procedure with a pole lathe to do some burnishing with shavings at the end, but I wanted something better. I had seen a youtube video from some kind of turner’s convention where an old-timer was burnishing with a metal rod on a pole lathe. The finish was ridiculous and it was something I’d never seen before. That got me thinking about just burnishing with a solid piece of wood instead of wood shavings. So I grabbed a piece of mystery wood that was a quarter inch thick by a couple inches across and a maybe five inches long. The burnishing was incredible, and fast, and easy. But one of the nuances of a pole lathe is that you can’t turn anything dead straight because your tools are always going in and out and in and out. You wind up with little undulations that might ultimately be hard to see (if you are good!), but still there. So I still needed to use shavings to get into some of those low spots. I used a narrow dowel to get into the interior curves on the legs. I did the same with the drawer pulls and it was really effective. The results looked really good, and I could have easily gotten them to the point where no finish would be needed if so desired. But this went into a first grader’s bedroom room so it definitely needed a robust finish; flying Bey-blades are not to be messed with! I will say though, I had no issues with exposed grain on the legs grabbing at my finishing cloth. Mission accomplished! Here’s a pic of a burnished drawer pull.
burnish drawer pull.jpg
The other area where end grain was a pain during finishing on my previous piece was the edges of the table top. Kicking myself after that one, I had decided that I needed to work through a bunch of sandpaper on the next project (this one). But now I decided to just plane the edges and burnish them with the same piece of wood. This was incredibly easy and I quickly got a very smooth edge with no difficulty. And come finishing time, I did not have problems with the end grain grabbing at my cloth. Here’s a pic of the edge of the table top.
burnish table top.jpg
I’m sure I could have gotten equally good results just using sandpaper. But it would have taken a lot longer. But the bigger thing for me is I feel like sandpaper is just an eraser and it will erase subtle tool marks that I feel add character. By burnishing, all those marks are preserved. This is especially evident with the table top pic where I just used a smoother to create the subtle round. But if you look at the legs closely in real life, you can see all the character that screams “these were turned on a pole lathe” which is kind of cool. If I didn’t want character in my pieces, I’d use power tools. So all in all, I think there will be a lot more burnishing with solid wood instead of just shavings in my future.
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Originally Posted by chris carter
