Pencil Post Bed - Applying the finish

Over the past week and a half, whenever I could slip a few minutes in at night or on the weekend I've begun to close in on the finished bed.

Last weekend I spent a pile of time sanding and adding the profile to the rails. On Monday night we cleaned the garage and hung most of the big pieces by string from one of the garage door rails and began to apply the finish.

Having read a recent article in Fine Woodworking on preventing cherry from getting a blotchy finish - Blotch-Free Cherry I decided to follow one of the suggested courses:

1) Apply a wash coat of diluted shellac - 50% dilution of Zinser Sealer Coat - Wax Free Shellac using 2/3 cup denatured alcohol to 1 cup shellac. See formulas: Mixing Shellac. Though I've never seen it printed on the can, it seems common knowledge that the Zinser shellac's are 2lb cuts so the diluted wash coat is therefore a 1lb cut.

2) Watco Danish Oil - Cherry colored.

We applied the washcoat of shellac on Monday night after cleaning the garage and hanging as much as we could from the garage door tracks.

After 24hrs (mostly because I needed to work all day) I sanded the entire project down by hand using 220gt sandpaper and then gave a quick rub over with Maroon synthetic steelwool.


We then rehung everything and applied the Danish oil using extremely liberal amounts.  Below is a picture of the headboard completely saturated with Danish oil. Due to the washcoat, the Danish oil largley floated on top.

We followed the directions on the can: apply first coat liberally, wait 30min, apply second coat, wait 15min and wipe off access using lint free "t-shirt" material cotton painter's rags. It was amazing how much rubbed off. The bulk of the red coloring wiped right off but enough stayed behind to give a pleasing brown hue with a slight tint of red. I had to keep going out to the garage every hour or so for the first few hours post application in order to wipe everthing down one more time to ensure that any oil that seeped out of the pores of the wood was removed.

I'm currently torn as to whether to apply a coat of poly or paste wax or just leave as is. I've a ton of  programming to do at work this weekend, plus I need to drill the angle iron for the side rails, cut and plane the poplar for the slats and buy a mattress. All before Tuesday. The finish feels smooth as a glass right now and its been curing this Tuesday night. We'll see if we apply the poly or not.