Hey, everyone. I’m out here in the garage, and I thought I’d talk a little bit today about wood repair…so stay tuned
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So, on the back side of my house, I actually painted it a few weeks ago…I didn’t take any video or anything because I was in a hurry to get that done before the rainy season hit. I did post some pictures on Instagram, so if you want to check out Instagram, Twitter, or even Facebook, I do have pictures over there if you want to check those out.
So, the last stage of painting the back side of the house is painting the trim… and before I can paint the trim, there’s some damage that i have to repair. So, this trim looks kind of like this…it’s this really dinky-looking 2”x2” material…I’m not sure why they used this kind of material back in the 70s, but that’s the way my house was built. There’s a lot of shoddy things about it that I don’t like, but that’s where I live right now…and I just have to deal with it.
So, in the meantime, until i can possibly replace that trim, I’m going to try to repair it. So, not knowing a whole lot about wood fillers, I had some of this stuff on hand…this is Elmer’s Pro Bond Professional Strength wood filler…as you can see there, and normally this stuff does a pretty good job…I’ve used it many times on projects, but in this instance, since I had a large gouge, it really didn’t do a very good job of filling in that gouge.
So, this is definitely not the stuff I want to use…and instead what I have is this stuff here…this is Minwax High Performance wood filler…and you get this hardener that comes with it. So, this should set up pretty fast…it should harden pretty well…so, we’re gonna give it a shot, see how it does…let’s get into it!
So, this is the form that I made, and you can see it’s got this bottom cap piece…it’s got the two sides…and it seemed to work pretty well until I pulled it off…and you can see there’s a lot of material still left in there. So, that is basically my first attempt, and we’re going to try this again and see how it works out with the Minwax instead.
Alright, so I recreated our gouge that we have outside on this piece of wood…I’m going to take a length measurement of that gouge…and that’s somewhere around, looks like, about 3-1/4” in length and roughly about 1-7/16” in width…so, I need to keep that in mind because when I make my form…I want to make my form about the same size width-wise as this piece of wood.
I used a straight piece of leftover 7/16” plywood to build the form. I started by setting up the table saw to cut the longest side of the form, which was 1-7/8”…basically, 1-7/16” plus the 7/16” for the thickness of the plywood to account for the second side that would butt up against it.
I then cut the piece for the second side to 1-7/16”. Next, I cut the sides’ lengths to a little more than 4”…I probably could have just cut the sides to the same length as the gouge, though.
The last piece I cut was a cap for the bottom of the form, which was 1-7/8” by 1-7/8”.
With the pieces now cut, I covered the smoothest sides of the plywood pieces with duct tape so the form would release easier from the wood filler. I then attached the sides together with 1” brad nails before applying the filler.
I sanded the wood with 100-grit sandpaper to level out some of the high spots and provide a little bite for the filler. To ensure that the wood filler releases properly from the form, I’m lightly coating the duct tape with machine oil.
Alright, so now it’s time to mix the wood filler and the hardener…and this stuff has a very strong odor, so I would advise using it in a well-ventilated area…and possibly wearing a respirator. My choice, of course, is the 3m 6800 full-face mask, which I reviewed in another video that I’ll link somewhere here.
To mix the wood filler and the hardener, I’m using a scrap piece of cardboard and a body filler spreader, but a putty knife will work just fine. The ratio of wood filler to hardener is 16:1, and it’s advisable to only mix as much filler as needed in a 15-minute window.
Once it was mixed, I applied a little filler to the 2”x2” then filled the form. I then pressed the form into place on the 2”x2” and clamped it down, scraping off the excess material that squeezed out.
Alright, so we’re going to take this off now…it is really hard, as you can tell right there. It’s hardened up pretty well…it’s been about an hour I want to say. I’m going to take the clamps off to see what we’ve got here…hopefully, it’ll release correctly…take this one off…there we go…that looks pretty good. Alright, so now all I have to do is shape this and we’ve got our piece repaired…pretty cool!
Admittedly, I actually had to redo this corner because I used an electric sander to shape it, which was too aggressive. I switched to 120-grit sandpaper on a foam block, which worked much better.
BEFORE
AFTER
Alright, so there’s the wood repair using the High Performance wood filler by Minwax…and it actually works really well. I was really surprised by how well it sanded. I thought it was going to be very hard to sand, but it sanded really easily. I started out using the sander, which was probably too aggressive…then once I redid the repair and backed off and used just hand sanding, it turned out really well.
So, hopefully this information was helpful…and thanks for watching!
Ben
