Well as many of you have witnessed it is damn hot. Sooooo progress has seemed to go slow on this job.
Anyway a picture of the bed base with the 9 drawers.
I was once again not happy with the initial stain, I am not a fan of General Finishes Gel stains and or gel varnish. Their Gel stains have a finish built in therefore when you reapply over an area that was just stained in the last few minutes the new stain removes the stain applied at the beginning of the task. Normally not a problem to avoid this but if you go in a circle around a face frame you end up where you started and that is the problem area. Anyway I also got tired of dealing with short rail and stiles when sanding. My small Festool orbital sander is a great sander when sanding with the grain but that becomes a chore where rails and stiles meet. The picture shows the face of the frame that I sanded down with the new sander.
And a picture of the face frame with the newly sanded and restained face. Also the raised panel style drawer fronts. The new sander made sanding the bevels on the ends a quick easy task.
I began the head and foot boards a couple of days ago and will provide pictures at various stages.
And finally, before resanding I bought a new Festool sander, ETS EC 125/3 EQ. Quite a finish sander that is a ROS too as opposed to my rectangle pad Festool orbital finish sander. Very smooth, you can actually start the sander while it sits on the work and there is no ROS walk or resistance when you run into grain variations. Quiet, powerful, well balanced, easy to hold for vertical sanding,and little vibration. Transitioning from rails to stiles and visa versa the scratch pattern is much less noticeable now, when using stain. As a side note, I think that the biggest problem I was having was only sanding to 150 grit as instructed by the label on the GF can.. Always in the past I sanded to 180 and never had issue with orbital sanders using Lawrence McFadden and or Bartelys gel stains. But then those were much better quality stains. Perhaps I should give Old Masters gel stains a try, I love their gel varnish especially now that I have been practicing what their label suggests, wiping down twice immediately with separate rags/towels quickly after applying the finish. ;~)
And totally OT but interesting, a video of the guy that trolls here. I pretty much thought this was going on. ;~)