The Picnic Table Set: From Start to Refinish
Todd Arend is a freelance writing professional whose expertise covers a variety of areas, including patio and backyard furniture, landscaping and design. He regularly writes for such sites as http://www.outdoorfurnitureplus.com/
Outdoor furniture is exposed all sorts of damaging elements that indoor furniture does not. Things like rain, sun and hail can prematurely age and majorly damage furniture, especially over time. If you spend good money on a quality picnic table set, you want it to work for you and last for years. One important aspect of patio furniture maintenance is maintaining a good finish. Here’s how to identify and restore the finish to your furniture.
Identify Existing Finish
If you purchase an old picnic table set there’s a good chance that there will already at least the remnants of a finish. This is important to figure out, as not knowing could cause you to damage a good finish and it’s easier to match when you go to refinish the piece.
Clear Finishes
There are three main kinds of clear finishes that you might find on your picnic table set. These are shellac, lacquer and varnish. To test for shellac, use a cotton ball soaked in denatured ethyl alcohol and rub onto a small area of your picnic table set. If it dissolves completely, then it’s shellac.
If the finish only partially dissolves when you use the alcohol, you might be dealing with a shellac and lacquer compound. Test the same area again using ethyl alcohol mixed with lacquer thinner and see if it dissolves all the way.
On the other hand, if alcohol didn’t seem to affect the finish at all, try lacquer thinner by itself. If the test area goes rough and then turns smooth again it’s probably lacquer. However, if it goes rough and crinkles without turning smooth, then it’s varnish. If both alcohol and lacquer thinner do nothing to change the look or texture of the finish then you’re dealing with straight varnish.
Tinted Finishes
There are also tinted finishes, such as paints or enamel, but these are obviously much easier to pick out. Using color swatches, try and pick out the closest shade and bring this to the hardware store with you when buying paint.
Miscellaneous Finishes
Aside from these, there are also oil and wax finishes to look out for. You can tell these by their texture and the fact that they are less glossy than other finishes. Both oil and wax can be applied to a picnic table set multiple times in a year to protect the condition of the wood.
Old finish problems
There are different ways in which old finishes and wood surfaces can exhibit signs of distress. These include being alligatored, cracked, crazed and scratched. Alligatored finishes are so-called because the small intersecting crack pattern is thought to resemble and alligator. All of these conditions are basically one and the same and result because of sunlight exposure and changes in temperature. There’s also a condition called blushing, a discoloration of wood caused by humidity, water exposure and time.
Restoring old finishes
There are a few different techniques the professionals use to restore antique furniture, and these will work just as well on your old picnic table set. Some of these methods include re-amalgamation, a near liquefying of the surface, spot-patching, or using steel wool to buff away discoloration and overcoating an old finish.
In some cases, the surface of your picnic table set will be too dilapidated to restore as is, so you might want to cover imperfection with a stylized, special effects finish, like stenciling, weathering and flyspecking.
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