new to flat work need advice

I am making a kitchen table for a customer It will be a piece of 1" pine with several tight knots I want to finish with a high gloss white paint. What do I need to use to fill in the pine so it will be smooth? Do I use a filler ,sanding sealer or what? Also after painting do I need to put on a finish like varnish or poly and should it be food safe?

Thanks for any advice.

Tom, if the wood's going to be painted, I'd use something like Durham's Rock Hard Water Putty. Bonds well, sands great, and finishes nicely under paint, too.

Any commercial finish you use will be food safe after it has cured. I'll let some of the others chime in on whether to clear coat the paint or not.

Tom you will want to shellac all the knots, this will keep them from bleeding through. You can use a good lacquer sealer white and then apply lacquer White top coat. If you have a spray booth. Or use the brushing Lacquer.

I would do any fill of questionable areas with Bondo, available at the home centers. I would use Zinseer's Seal Coat shellac available at the home centers. It's a shellac without wax. Then use a white oil base paint, or a white lacquer. Neither of those two coatings would need a clear coat. A 2K Urethane would also work.




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Oh yeah, I forgot about Bondo. Great stuff with painted wood.

I generally will not use bondo on wood except for molding. Bondo is harder then wood and when the wood moves the bondo will not and will crack out. It also has a tendency to give up the ghost so to say when it comes to bonding with paint. years ago I was on a job where bondo was used the a year and a half before on trim to fill gaps and it was cracking out. That's all I needed to see. Never had any problem useing 2 part epoxy wood filler or water born wood fillers. A lot of the time I will cut slivers of wood to fill gaps and use a epoxy toned to the wood color to cement the slivers.

Dave Hawksford said:

I generally will not use bondo on wood except for molding. Bondo is harder then wood and when the wood moves the bondo will not and will crack out. It also has a tendency to give up the ghost so to say when it comes to bonding with paint.

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Well, I don't have problems with Bondo . It sticks very well to wood. I can't say that I've seen expansion/contraction in or around filled areas that allowed wood movement to offer cracking to the Bondo. Usual finishing is to prime the surface or use a sealer and coat. Bondo does react to movement issues, as it holds up well in automotive repairs on metal, that moves in any direction, which is unlike wood that only really moves tangentially (cross grain). In the automotive use the exposure is quite different than for furniture use, as cars are exposed to extreme temperature and weather conditions. That said, Bondo holds up well.

As for using epoxy, it makes for a good fill, and dries harder than Bondo, and is more difficult to sand. Epoxies have a tendency over time to over-cure and start to crystallize. This lends to "reading the repair" from the finish coat. IMO, it's not as friendly in being primed and painted as I might like.




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I hear ya Mike, Most all the smoothing process to epoxy is done while drying. I use different size chisels for finial shaping which leaves very little sanding.