Site Search Results

Never guarantee a finish on this era of furniture. Inform your customers of this issue and steer customers away from using light colors. Many mahogany pieces from the late 1920's to early 1930's have an aniline dye lacquer finish which can bleed through no matter how many times you paint or prime over it. Although ideal coverage over an aniline dye lacquer can never be guaranteed, the following two products have been known to minimize bleed through:

All bright white paint will yellow slightly with time, even without topcoat. You have probably tried to touch up white woodwork in your home after several years and noticed that the new paint is brighter.

But white and light paints can react if clear coated with a waterbased finish; water-based topcoats are reactive and may draw out substances in the wood such as tannins, dyes or unknown substances in existing finishes causing the topcoat to yellow. This is an industry-wide issue and can happen right away, years later or never.

The sticky areas you're encountering are most likely pine pitch, also known as sap. This substance has a distinctive sweet, pine-like odor that is easily recognizable. Unfortunately, there is no foolproof method to prevent the pitch from seeping through the paint over time.

Cleaning and Preparation

Before painting, it's crucial to clean the affected areas thoroughly. You have several options for this:

Our recommendation to fix white cabinets that have yellowed is to do a thorough sanding and precleaning and recoat with the following products:

Water Based Stains will always exhibit a bit of bleed through. When glazing with any color over water stains, we recommend some type of seal coat is applied first.

A primer is your best defense under light-colored paint.

Another technique to avoid the slight color change that sometimes occurs when applying topcoat is to add 10-15% of the paint you are using to your topcoat. This technique layers additional coats of color over your piece as well as providing the protection of a topcoat. If you don't like measuring, just add enough paint until you can see a bit of the hue in the topcoat. This method works with a brush or a spray gun.

To maintain the full-strength protection of the topcoat, DO NOT TINT YOUR FINAL COAT of topcoat.

Although we spray product all the time in our workshop, with several sprayers ranging from airless to HVLP, we do not consider ourselves to be spray gun experts for all brands.

To get the latest information, we recommend you contact Jeff Jewitt of Homestead Finishing Products and/or Paint Sprayers Plus for the best advice.