I planed down some Oak boards for my desktop and one of the boards on one
end has a swirly type grain and when I planed it down it caused some pitted
tearout. Do any of you know of a product I can get that I could use as a
filler that would match the Oak and be stainable and would not show up after
staining and applying several coats of poly? I would appreciate your
suggestions as to what I should buy to fix this problem. Thanks.

Dave wrote:

I planed down some Oak boards for my desktop and one of the boards on one
end has a swirly type grain and when I planed it down it caused some pitted
tearout. Do any of you know of a product I can get that I could use as a
filler that would match the Oak and be stainable and would not show up after
staining and applying several coats of poly? I would appreciate your
suggestions as to what I should buy to fix this problem. Thanks.


If you use a high angle blade (assuming you have a bevel up plane, of
course), the tear out could be removed, rather than trying to "patch
things up". Never seen a filler that will go undetectable under stain.
I spend an extra $32 or so to get a high angle blade for each of my
bevel up planes, just to deal with this problem.

Dave

On Wed, 07 Dec 2005 17:16:07 GMT, "Dave" wrote:

I planed down some Oak boards for my desktop and one of the boards on one
end has a swirly type grain and when I planed it down it caused some pitted
tearout. Do any of you know of a product I can get that I could use as a
filler that would match the Oak and be stainable and would not show up after
staining and applying several coats of poly? I would appreciate your
suggestions as to what I should buy to fix this problem. Thanks.

On method thats successful for me is to first stain the area that has
the tearout. Then fill the tearout with superglue, the thick kind.
With your glue bottle in one hand and a spray bottle of accellerator
in the other, this goes pretty fast.

Its far better to underfill with the glue than overfill. You can
always add more later but if you get too much it will take
considerable sanding to get it off

Dont put the superglue on any area that doesnt have stain on it
already.

When you think you have it all, sand it all back flat. If you lose
some stain dont worry about it, you're just looking at the tearout
areas for now.

re-stain and re-apply superglue as necessary, and keep sanding the
glue back so the surface is flat.

when you have all the tearout filled, go ahead and stain the entire
board and apply the poly. The tearout areas will have completly
disappeared. By applying the stain first the color shows thru the
glue, as does the grain pattern in the areas that were torn out.

As david said, almost any other kind of filler is going to show to
some degree or other, but if you want to try that route instead I
suggest Wunderfill from Rockler. The 'natural' color works pretty
good on red oak, but if you're dealing with white oak you may want to
tint the filler as best you can to try to match the wood.

A card scraper works pretty well for this situation.
Dave