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Yes, believe it, this entry is not about furniture or lacquer!

While watering my orchids and other plants in the office I discovered that my Phal has gone into spike! This is major news, very exciting — even if only to other orchid growers.

A while back my Phal started growing a new leaf, for quite a long time it had five instead of the usual four. A week or two ago the very small underleaf dropped off. This left the very, very large top leaf to become the underleaf, and the newly grown leaf then becomes to the top leaf.

This basically causes the entire plant to double in size.

The new psuedobulb of my Dend is still growing, even though some of the leaflets have dried up. I’m not sure if this is normal, it seems like it would be, or there’s some kind of problem. In either case, I think it’s doing okay now.

I really wish I had more room, it’d be great to have some more orchids. I’ve kept these two alive (though one died — not my fault — it had rotted roots when I bought it — which was my fault for not checking, but I didn’t know to check, lol) for over a year now, so apparently I’m doing alright. ;)

As it stands, I barely have enough room for all of my plants anyway. The two Pothos plants I have are growing at such an incredible rate I’m still not quite sure what exactly to do with them, lol.

Anyway, the spike. When a Phal orchid goes into ’spike’ that means it has started to grow the ’stick’ that the flowers will then grow from. Getting an orchid to rebloom is probably the most difficult part of growing them — at least in such lacking environmental conditions as my office, or a home in general; anything other than a humidity and temperature controlled greenhouse.

The shitty spray nozzles on the Duplicolor cans that caused the lacquer to spurt and drip and leak pretty much totally destroyed the finish I’d been doing.

No matter what I did to try to fix it, the general surface just started looking worse and worse. The only option now is to either throw the entire table away — which I won’t do — or totally strip the top surface to bare MDF then size, prime, and re-lacquer it.

I am completely disgusted at this point. Today has been totally wasted.

Hurrah for finding another brand of black lacquer at the auto parts store. It’s Duplicolor and has the fan nozzle. With my little MDF absorption trauma fresh in my mind I decided it’d be best to prime the side table, so I also got the ’sandable primer’ also made by Duplicolor, since it’s also lacquer based I figured it would work okay.

Well, the primer seems nice, no big issues with application. I then went onto spraying the lacquer, argh!

The primer is absolutely ineffective at sealing the MDF, so back to the glue-sizing method, This time mixing it 1:1 with water. I also noticed, to my horror, that the can of black lacquer is seemingly defective. I had lacquer all over my finger and before I knew it, anytime I’d go to re-shake the can I’d be flinging droplets all around! I really hope this is an isolated defective can and that the other can of black lacquer doesn’t exhibit this problem. I pretty much wasted the can, not that it was useful anyway — but the problem is that I basically need to start over, thanks to gigantic droplets of the lacquer on the horizontal surfaces of the side table.

I’m hoping I can very lightly sand those out, but the bottom surface is absolutely coated with excess, with very little I could do to prevent it, other than not spraying. I’m fantastically annoyed at this point, enough to go ahead and probably drop whatever amount of money is necessary for a proper HVLP setup, defective spray nozzles ruining hours of work is not something I have any tolerance for.

Addendum: The spurting all over the place of the lacquer from the can was not an isolated occurance, because after about a minute it started happening again. Of course, it happened as I was spraying the top surface! Then I made a really stupid mistake of wiping the lacquer droplets off, HAHA… it wiped all the way through the primer I’d put on. Well, folks, it’s true that lacquer chemically ‘melts’ into all other lacquer coatings — I can’t say layers, since there is only one layer, due to the chemical fusing that happens.

Deft to the rescue, again. I popped off the total piece of shit Duplicolor spray nozzle that was causing the leaking, spurting, and destruction of my table’s finish and popped on one of the Deft spray nozzles that I’d been saving for just such an instance. There is a massive difference in spray quality using the Deft nozzle! The spray is finer, and, guess what? It isn’t spurting lacquer all over the place anymore! I’d really like to blame this on me, but I’m shaking the can enough, even the 10 seconds every minute as recommended — which is when lacquer splatters everywhere of course, and I’m also clearing out the nozzle by holding it upside down on a regular basis.

Of course, I have three not so little holes (the size of a dime) in the lacquered top, I also have two big droplets that I hadn’t wiped off. I need to fill the holes — which should be entertainingly horrible, and then sand down everything around it… AGAIN!

The overhead lighting in the lounge is absolutely unforgiving of gloss finishes. After staring at the top surface of the coffee table for seemingly endless periods of time outside and in the shed, I was very satisfied. I’m still very satisfied, but the resultant finish is not nearly as free of dust and minor imperfections as I’d thought it was.

Regardless of the multitude of difficulties, here we go, the coffee table is now considered finished — with a tentative “for now” added on to the end.

The beauty of the lacquer is that I can reapply at any time, and sometime in the future if I feel I need a better gloss, smoothness, etc, I can always do a ‘rub out’ and polish it, in theory all the way to a perfect mirror finish. I highly doubt I’d ever really bother with that, considering there were some ‘construction defects’ that I never really cared all that much about, since they’re hidden inside/under the top.

I’m happy with it, it certainly looks better than the enamel version, and again certainly better than the previously chipping clearcoat over silver paint.

Addenum: This was a purely stupid mistake. Just because it’s dry, doesn’t mean it has cured. The Deft website indicates that the brushing lacquer dries to handle in 18 hours; I forget what the can says for the aerosol, but whatever the time frame is, I didn’t reach it. I went down to check on the table top, remembering that I’d left the tealight tray on the top. I took precautions by putting a little strip of felt down, but upon checking where the felt was it created a felt pattern in the topcoat of the lacquer… Whoops! Being the absolute …whatever… I immediately had to carry it back out to the shed and recoat the lacquer. I’ll leave it in the shed for the next twelve plus hours, carefully set it outside to cure some more while I do other activities, and then after a considerable length of time — that is until it starts getting dark, I’ll then move it back inside. Once inside I’ll keep everything off it for a while… It’s a good thing I learned this on the much easier to move coffee table than discovering I made a big ass dent in the top of my desk whenever I get around to doing the refinish on that.

It sure is a slow process, but I think we’re getting there. The we being my coffee table and myself.

I bought another can of the pricey Rustoleum Black Lacquer, but, ugh, I’m still so incredibly dissatisfied with it. I started spraying today with the clear Deft product, so far so good I think. Except that inevitably within moments of spraying down a topcoat there has to be a big hunk of dust or fuzz that lands right smack dab in the center of the table top.

Right now I’m waiting for the second coat of clear to dry, so in about a half hour I’ll try to rub out the dust and give it one additional coat, that’ll make a total of about five on the top of the table, so far so good I think.

This isn’t looking good form a financial prospective. There were two cans of black lacquer, and this will make going into a second can of the clear. I’m not bothering to get the insides of the coffee table all that finished, mostly because there’s always stuff sitting on those shelves anyway, it’s not really something I’m going to concern myself with. The black enamel did a fairly good job on the shelves anyway, I know it’s sort of a half-assed thing to do, but…

I’m a bit sick of putting all this time, effort, and cash into just one object. It’ll just have to be good enough at this point. I’m looking into other brands of black/pigmented lacquer, but so far I’m not turning up with anything. Krylon, Duplicolor, & Plastikote supposedly make it, but I found nothing at Walmart, Lowes, and Home Depot. It then occured to me that I should start checking the auto parts stores, but they’ll certainly be rather overpriced given the ’special nature’ of the store. I’m hoping that I can get away with just using a black spray paint as the undercoat; supposedly there would be adhesion issues, with the lacquer solvent melting and possibly lifting the paint, but, hmmm, we’ll just have to see. That’s for the other two pieces, the side table and the tv stand.

I’m still so very happy that I bought the respirator, I think if I hadn’t and I attempted to empty an entire can of lacquer in one session, as I’ve done both times with the black, I’d probably be on the floor passed out, drowing in my own vomit. Yes, the solvent is just that bad.

I think, if I don’t get a sprayer (and I found one that ought to work for about $100) I’ll try to brush the Deft clear onto my desk — testing first — so as to build up the layers at a lower cost. Then topcoat with the spray can. I’m interested in a sprayer because we’re restaining the deck this year, spraying the stain on would be considerably nicer than having to do it the usual way. Purchasing a quart of black lacquer is less than an easy thing to do, I’m fairly sure I’ll have to order it online somewhere, but at least the clear stuff is easily obtained in quarts and gallons.