Fish Tank Cabinet

Hi everyone,

I'm new here and to working with wood and have been reading through these forums trying to pick up a some info, and so far I've found a whole heap of awesome stuff, great forum :)

I've been struggling trying to put a finish on my fish tank cabinet, it's a radiata pine cabinet that was not built by me, and I've sanded it all back and have been testing out stains etc on the back of the doors. I have gone through a few stains now and some money :) but I've decided to go with Wattyl Traditional Cedar, it has so far given the best result. I basically followed some advice I found in here and what I did was sand the wood to 400g and then wet it and once dried sanded it again back to 400g, but didn't start very low, then I applied the stain. Seems to give a pretty reasonable colour... although it does seem a little grey?

I'm now looking at finishing and I first tried some Cabot Clear Gel, which seems to be ok except for having lots of trouble with dust and crap getting in the finish. I grabbed some Minmax wipe on poly that people seem to like and tried it on my trad cedar stain and it took the stain right off (almost)?? I let the stain dry for a day and a night before trying the above...

Should I be looking at using EEE polish or some other polish afterwards? Is there anywhere in Melbourne I can easily buy the stuff?

Any help would be greatly appreciated... I've seen some of the work in here and I would like to get into this a bit more and maybe try my hand at actually doing a build of something at some point too... I think the feeling of having something you built that looks good in your house is pretty awesome...

Cheers guys!

Here is one you may want to try, pine is known to blotch, to reduce or prevent the blotching you could first seal it, you could even use the clear coating you will be using to finish the cabinet.

You could thin out the clear coating 50% as your sealer, apply the sealer, let it dry, and then sand down half of the sample, then apply the stain, you will get 2 colors, the sanded side will be lighter, decide which side you prefer. On some woods it may take more then one coat of sealer and sanding.

Be sure you try this on a sample, to get familar with the method of staining.

You can use any of the drying oils as your sealer.

Photo attached.

Good Luck

A Few things to consider with staining radiata...

The finer the grit you sand it too, the less colour you get from staining, ie you will get darker colour from sanding with 240 grit than you will with 400 grit.

The colour of the stain changes to a more honey/yellow colour when finish is applied

Do not try to finish over the Wattyl stain for a few days.

Something I do, but don't think its really recomended by more experienced people, after a few days drying wipe over the stain with a rag damp with Turps, when you don't get any colour on the rag, its ready to finish.

Little dust nibs are a pain, and almost unavoidable, to try to prevent it, vacum the work piece and wipe down with metho between coats and sanding, cover the piece as soon as it is touch dry and finally hit it with EEE then wax after allowing 3 weeks for the finish to cure.

Preparing to be shot down in flames.......

Cheers for that, will give some of those ideas a go... this is certainly helping build my patience levels up!

Here is the finish I have managed to achieve thus far: Back of door

The left slat has the wipe on poly - some stain was removed and it's streaky, the right two are using the gel clear.