Review: Varathane Stain+Poly (Antique Walnut)

If you are tempted to invite Satan into your home, look no further than a combined stain and polyurethane. For it is he.

I am a professional cabinetmaker. I have a fair amount of experience with finishing wood. This time I tried to cut corners.

I committed a faux pas in choosing poplar for a stain grade finish. It’s a cheap hardwood with huge colour variations (including some green), and quite rubbishy grain that is both weak and chaotic. It’s perfect for painting, but looks grungy stained unless you are very careful with board selection.

I chose some nice boards with uniform grain and colour. I should have pre-stained, stained, then varnished in three separate steps. Instead, because I was using cheap wood, I used a cheap finish.

The first coat went on pretty nicely. I made a schoolboy error in attempting to fix a smudge with mineral spirits—DO NOT DO THIS BECAUSE IT WILL MAKE A NOTICEABLE PATCH WITH TINY BUBBLES—but I was pretty happy with the evenness. Then I went in for the second coat.

I am now drinking a stiff drink (Kona Hanalei IPA :P) after suffering nervous collapse. The second coat is a night terror. I defy even the most accomplished wood finisher to create a smooth even coat. This is because the product, necessarily, contains pigment. It starts off tacky, then gets tackier, so every brush stroke is visible. This can be an issue even when brushing on clear coat, but when there is pigment mixed in it’s near-impossible to hide the brush marks. It also means that the second coat varies greatly in thickness, therefore hue. I’m sweating.

I was doing 3x7 foot frames at a 4” width, so I had to go around in a circle. That meant I met the starting point at the end. The starting point was way too dry to blend by that point. I even tried to swap sides on my way down. Bleak.

Then there were the runs. Runs are terrible in any context. These runs had about a 2-minute working time, after which they became eternal. I think I have got rid of most of them. But this job looks, always will look, forever…

..amateur..

Save your soul and your Saturday by using stain then a clear coat.

Thank you.