slab dressing

[lea mcallan]

I have some mango and white cedar slabs and need advice on dressing. Should I varnish finish or just stain? I also need advice on grades of sandpaper to use. New to this, please help. Lea.

[Bleedin Thumb]

I'll leave the finishing part to my more learned colleges.
Depending on how rough your slabs are you may want to start at 40 grit on a belt sander and work your way down.
The trick is to go down in grades in as little progressions as possible ie 240 to 320 to 400 grit etc where you stop is up to you ( the wood will tell you).
Oh BTW welcome

[Ianab]

Hi Lea

If you tell us what you intend to use the boards for it will be easier to suggest a suitable finish.

Like BT says, the choices of sandpaper depends on how rough the surface is now, and how smooth you want it to be when it's finished. If it's just rough sawn, then start with a real course grit (40 or 60) and work your way up. If it's been machine planed and you just need to remove the machining marks then you can start around 120 grit.
You dont have to use every grit in the range, but you need to work up in stages. 40 grit will chew off the roughsawn marks quickly, but will leave sanding marks because of the grit size. So you swap to 80 grit, and remove those, leaving 80 grit marks. 120 takes care of those, and so on. Eventually you cant see the marks and you are done.

Cheers

Ian

[conwood]

Hello,
Why do you want to use stain?

As for finishing, bleedin thumb is correct. Up thru the grades gradually. You may wet between sands to raise the grain or use a dedicated sanding sealer product too.

I recently did this-from 40 to 600 grit, and then used 600 between coats too. For the final finished I used a high quality furniture polish which I applied with 1200 grit wet/dry. The finish came up to mirror smooth on touch.

You may want to explore EEE Ubeaut finish. There are many users of this forum for this and they all rave about it.

cheers,
conwood