#11 REPAIRS

BASIC REPAIR MATERIAL CHOICES

1) Old English Scratch Cover, Dark & Light (with cloth)

2) Furniture marker pens set of at least 6 colors (dollar store)

3) Wax Fill Sticks, multiple colors

4) Mohawk Hard Wax Burn Kit

5) Liquid paper bottle (from dollar store)

6) Magic eraser pad (dollar store)

7) Wall spackling (3M with spatula bottle is best)

8) Craft Paint set & sm brush (most common wall colors)

9) Wood Super Glue and accelerator

10) Color epoxy putty set

11) Small torch lighter

12) Matt, Gloss, & semi Gloss varnish spray cans

13) Tightbond III

14) Clamps

15) Towels and rags

practice required

All of the material options described on this page might seem nearly self explanatory, for the most part, giving the possible impression that you could just "wing it" for the first time when the need arises. This is not the case. You will find that on your first attempt at even the simplest techniques you will do it not quite right, make a mistake, learn what not to do, learn how to do it better and wish you had already known what you had learned during the attempt.

All of these methods take multiple practice attempts in order to get it even fairly right, and take many many attempts in order to master. That means you are planning on failure if you wait until it really matters to try a thing for the first time. The plan for success is to PRACTICE. You need to look for opportunities to practice, which means do repairs semi-regularly, either practice at home or at every opportunity on the job site.

This also means that, unless you are positive that you can do a good repair, you should not indicate to a customer that you can do a repair until you either do it first, or try your technique on a small TEST area of the repair, before telling the customer that you can do your repair attempt. Sometimes it will surprise you that the repair does not go as well as you might imagine.

It is very expensive and it takes a long time and a lot of effort to hire a furniture repair guy to do repairs. For example the average scratch or indentation mark on a wood floor costs from $500 to $4,000 to repair (actual quoted costs), with a wait time of sometimes months. The time to deal with repairs is to PREVENT THEM, by taking the time to search for and report pre-existing damage, and by gaining the expertise and putting in the time and effort to not cause damage in the first place.

1) old english

Old English Scratch cover comes in Dark and Light versions. It's the quickest and easiest for coloring scratches, and especially multiple scratches and scratched areas. The drawback is that it only colors the scratch, and doesn't fill in the depth of the scratch, and so leaves the scratch visible by the reflective or sheen difference of the scratch. In addition, Old English shouldn't be used in combination with any of the other filler materials because the oils in Old English prevent any of those other fillers from sticking inside the scratch well, such as fill-stick or hard wax material.

That means Old English should only be used when the intent is a stand alone remedy, where it isn't needed to also fill the depth of the scratch and deal with the reflective-sheen visibility problem. If the color of the wood is somewhere between the dark and light formulas, you can mix some of each of the two right onto your rag.

TRADE SECRET

Trade Secret is a different brand of the same type of thing as Old English, but a little more expensive and a little better.

2) furniture markers

When a scratch is desired to be colored in combination with a filler, the easier quicker cheaper remedy is to use the furniture marker (permanent ink) and filler pens. When a "higher end" job is needed, use the hard wax melt kit, described later.

You can get sets of 3 of these furniture marker pens from the dollar store, one set of lighter colors and one set of darker colors.

Or, on amazon you can get all 6 colors plus grey and white along with the wax color sticks (crayons) with the crayon sharpener in a 17 piece set for $16.

A key secret to using these pens is to color a scratch quickly, and then within 3 to 5 seconds wipe the surface strongly with a rag. If you don't wipe away the surface this quick, the coloring can stick to the whole surface and not just stay in the scratch. These are permanent ink markers, just like a sharpie. But permanent markers contain a solvent that dissolves the ink, so old marks that are on top of a varnish finish can be removed by laying down another layer of ink (with the solvent in it) and wiping quickly.

Another key aspect to using these color pens is to always go from lighter to darker. You can make a scratch darker with these pens, but you can't make it lighter, other than by making a new scratch. Even using a "light" color, when making repeated passes, darkens the scratch with every pass. So the selection of which marker to use should be based not only on the darkness of the marker but also the amount of "redness", "greyness" or "brown-ness", because just darkness can be increased by the number of passes of the marker laying down more pigments.

The set shown above is what I would recommend.

3) wax fill sticks

Wax fill sticks are basically crayons in common furniture colors.

These can fill in the depth of a scratch, and also be polished to make the surface have a sheen/reflection that matches the surrounding wood. The more you wipe a cloth over wax, more shinny it gets. The more you wipe a rough finger over wax, the duller it gets. By using these two techniques to adjust the sheen/shine up or down you can dial in the sheen of the wax in the scratch to match the surrounding wood.

When considering using wax filler for scratches, keep in mind a few factors.

1) Rubbing wax into a scratch can make the scratch look visibly much better but the softer the wax the more it can wear away if walked on or rubbed, and so only "extra hard" waxes should normally be used on wood floors, while softer waxes are appropriate for low-wear surfaces of furniture.

2) Rubbing wax into a scratch makes the wax not adhere nearly as good as compared to melting the wax into place, so rubbing wax into place is more appropriate for non wear surfaces of furniture, not on wood floors.

Mohawk products makes a high-end version of these called "Fil-stick" that's easier and quicker to use, because they lay down easier (are softer stickier material), stick in the scratch or crevice easier than straight wax crayons, and come in more colors to more closely match the wood. But they're more spendy. A twelve pack runs $42, and you have to order them online. These are a good choice on furniture but the material is too soft for wood floors.

A cheap and easy to get version of wax fillers is a product called "Blend Stick". You get a set of 4 colors for $8. There are four different color sets available giving you 16 colors.

The benefit of these is that they are cheap, easy to use, and easy to get. The drawback is that they are the softest of all versions, and so wear off easier if they are laid in a scratch that is in a high wear area, and are also not very polishable.

4) mohawk burn kit

The Mohawk hard wax burn kit is the best tool to do the highest-end job of filling a scratch, small gouge, or very small "ding". This is done by melting an extra hard wax into the cavity in a way that soaks (as a liquid) into the pores of the wood. Waxy material sticks better if melted at a high temperature and allowed to soak into the open pores of non-varnished wood, such as a scratch that has removed the varnish.

The hard wax in this kit is extra hard and durable, difficult to even press your fingernail into with effort, made for being walked on. This kit is the best way to do a high-end scratch repair, but this kit costs $220

This kit uses a battery powered soldering iron with a needle like tip. You press a button on the soldering iron when you want to heat the needle rod. You hold the desired color stick to the metal rod and let the melted wax run down the rod to the tip that you are holding in the scratch. You move the tip along the scratch letting the molten wax soak right into the wood pores of the scratch.

After the wax cools, you'd then scrape the excess away with a credit card, and possibly run a small flame over it to level off the surface. Then you wipe with a cloth and your finger to get the desired sheen, as explained above.

These kits come with three fine tip brushes that can be used to add wood grain marks on top of the repair, which can often make all the difference in making the repair look invisible.

cheap alternative BURN combo KIT

Or, you can get a wax melt "burn" kit with battery powered soldering iron, wax colors, and a set of markers from a company called "Karidge" for $23 on Amazon. There's no cool carrying case, there's no brush tip markers, the color selection is more limited, the wax is not nearly as hard, and the soldering iron is not quite as good, BUT you can combine colors to make new colors, you can buy brush tip markers separately (or skip them), and it's only $23 instead of $220. This is actually a great choice if you're not going to go all out for the $220 kit.

5) liquid paper

One of the most common "dings" to walls is just a little one leaving a small dark mark. Correction fluid is the simplest fastest way to cover it up.

6) Magic eraser

Sometimes a mark on a wall or "thing" is most easily removed by using a magic eraser pad.

7) 3m spackling

This product is the best for filling holes and dings in a plaster wall. Get this exact one. Not one like it. This particular brand is the fastest drying, the best thickness, and the easiest to apply, due to the spatula and sand paper tip already being part of the bottle. It's only usually about $8 and is available at most larger hardware stores like Jerries'', Lowes, & Home Depot.

8) craft paint set

Once you fill your wall ding with the 3m plaster, you then need to color it to match the surrounding wall paint. Buy only the craft paint colors that are near normal wall colors, such as all near whites and off beiges, with hints of other colors. Skip the bright colors that you'd never see as wall paint. You should also get a paint brush and palate set from the dollar store. Or, if you're lucky, the home owner will still have some of their original wall color paint in the garage. It might be worth asking.

You can also empty out one of these dollar store sets, and replace the paint with your chosen wall colors. This is just a way to make your paint set smaller, for your portable set.

9) wood super glue & accelerator

For broken wood pieces, the easiest and quickest fix (by far) is to use wood super glue and accelerator. You spray the accelerator on one side of the thing to be glued, and then put the super glue on the other piece, then press them together hard for about ten seconds. Without the accelerator it often takes too long to set, even though you'd think this shouldn't be the case with super glue. This makes a "good" repair for non-structural cosmetic needs, but not nearly as strong and reliable as using Tightbond III as explained further down.

That makes this method the right choice for cosmetic repairs when speed of repair is important, but not the right choice when reliable high strength is important for structural repairs like the wooden leg of a chair. You can pick this stuff up at Jerry's.

10) color epoxy putty

When there's a whole chunk broken or missing off of a wooden item, a good solution is to replace the missing material with wood colored epoxy putty. You kneed it in your hands and squish it on just like regular epoxy putty. But it helps make it a more permanent fix if you drill some retention holes into the wood that allows the putty to grip into and around some edges before applying the putty. It's very hard to manipulate, sand, or cut off any putty after it hardens, so the way to do it is to do all the trimming and shaping before it finishes hardening. A credit card is very useful for this. This stick is only about $8

These epoxy putty sticks are also difficult to alter their colors, so it's a lot easier to pick a color that already matches the wood color you need. To have a selection to be better able to choose the right color it helps to have a whole set of premade colors. With this particular Mohawk set, it comes with a mixing guide to show you how to combine these colors to make most any wood color possible. This set is $168.

When using epoxy putty to fill voids in wood it is important to keep in mind that the bond will be much stronger if the fill material has a "undercut" hole to better hold onto, just like your hand holding onto a flat surface compared to a grip-hole.

You can add "grip holes" by drilling small holes into the wood under where the repair material is being added. Those holes work a little better if they are at slightly different angles, or reamed out more at the bottom of the hole than at the top of the hole.

It's also a lot of time-consuming work to try to sand the surface of epoxy or wood filler down level to the wood, and doing so also sands the surrounding wood, which changes the color of that wood even when you try to re-color it. The answer for repairs is to not have to sand it in the first place, but rather to shape the repair material into the desired flatness while the repair material is still soft. Or at least getting it as perfect as you can while it's still soft so that any sanding is as minimal as possible. It's ten times quicker to adjust in the soft stage. That means working quickly, and using a credit card or other tool to flatten, remove, and shape the material to perfection while the material is still soft.

11) tourch lighter

This works well to smooth out any waxy type filler material you might have used.

12) spray varnish

Get gloss, satin, matt, spray varnishes. These should be used on top of other filler material you used, to add a protective hard layer on top that won't rub off, but only on "higher end" repair jobs.

13) tightbond III

For wood breaks that need maximum strength, this is the stuff. When used in the right way with clamps it will make the broken area stronger than the original unbroken part.

When you clamp it, glue will ooze out over the next several minutes, so you need to wipe it away as it comes out to avoid a mess. It's water soluable before it dries, and easy to wipe away with a damp rag.

14) clamps

When used with Tightbond III wood glue, this makes a repair mend stronger than the original wood. If the clamp feet don't lay flat on the item being clamped, you may need to add cardboard or something similar to protect the wood.

15) paper towels & lint-free rags

You'll need 'em.

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