Hamilton/Roberts Designs Woodworking : Fine Wood Jewelry Boxes : Exotic Wood Heirloom Boxes : Wall Shelves

Some of the most beautiful wood we use is often porous at best and punky, verging on rotten, at worst, especially on our lid insets. Palm woods are variable – porous next to extremely hard as you can see in the side-grain Black Palm in these photos. Over the past few years we’ve come to rely on Cyanoacrylate glue, commonly know as “Super Glue”. We use a CA distributed by Starbond that is very good and much more affordable than those tiny bottles you find at the home building or woodworking stores. Click on the thumbnails as we describe our process. This method is commonly used on our domed lid insets but can be appplied to any porous or punky wood.

First, we have finished sanding to 220 grit on a belt sander. We simply keep pouring on the CA until we have a fairly thick, solid coat with no dull areas, occasionally spraying accelerator to set the CA. Be careful with the accelerator as too much too fast will result in a white crusty foam. Practice! We spread it carefully with a toothpick, moving the CA puddle around to keep it in a dull porous area until it sets. CA tends to move away from a porous depression for some reason.

After we have a rough impervious coat over the whole inset, we use a file to roughly get the surface smoother. This will show any low spots that we again fill.

We then move on to sanding it with 220 and (this is the trick!) scraping it with a slightly curved single-edge razor blade, again filling low spots that are revealed. This is laborious but well worth it and is actually faster than sanding. It’s also satisfying work.

Then we move through 400, 600 and even 800. After a quick buff with Fibral synthetic steel wool or regular steel wool we finally end up with a very smooth surface ready to finish along with the rest of the box. We will be lacquering and lightly sanding and buffing later so any very small depressions are usually smoothed down enough to not be noticeable. It feels good to save this beautiful wood that otherwise barely makes good firewood!