How to Choose a Brush for Your Top Coat
When you're ready to put a top coat on your wood working project and you're going to brush it on. It’s very important that you choose the right brush for what you're doing. You are not going to get a million dollar finish out of one dollar brush. Everything I've got here, I got here it home centers, so this stuff is rarely available. But you got to look for it a little bit.
First let me talk about what the tip of the brush should look like in the perfect world. The perfect world we’d like to have which call a “Chisel tip brush”. What that means is that this has been shaped up like this, up like this. Think about what there's going to do for you as you're spreading your finish; it’s going to concentrate the contact here making it a lot easier to level that finish out. Make sure that you have a good flow in coat, so that’s one feature to look forward.
Now, lets look at bristles specifically I'm going to use this one as an example. What you want in the bristles is a bristle that is thick at the Ferro land and thinner down at the tip. What that does is it gives the brush flexibility, so that is your spreading your finish. It’s easier to get a level coat.
Additionally, when you look really, really closely at that bristle, you like it to be flag. What that means is you're like split ends in your hair, not a problem I have. But what that split does is it allows that tip to hold more finish. So that once you're dipped and applying, it’s going to flow out better because you have more finish on the bristles. So chisel tip, tampered. They get the Ferro small tip, flag meaning there's split.
Now the other thing that you want to pay attention too is a natural bristle that’s what I've got on this brush versus synthetic bristles that’s what I've got on this one. With all of you're solvent base finishes like lacquer, chela and varnish, you can use either a natural or synthetic bristle brush. As a general rule, the natural bristle is going to make it a little easier to level your finish. If you're going to a water based finish, you want to stick with the synthetic bristle.
The reason for that is that the natural bristle, these hairs have a tendency to get a little too soft and you start to lose control of being able to film the finish off. So shot for a brush, look at them closely because I said everything I have here, I got it home center so they are out there. But you got to look closely at the brush, make sure you getting the right one for the job to make sure the job you do on your finish is a good one.
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