That old timer in the shop made me rethink my whole approach to finishing

I was at my local lumber yard in Tacoma last week picking up some maple for a built-in I'm doing, and this guy who's gotta be pushing 80 walks up and starts looking at my plywood. He asks what I'm building and I tell him, and he just goes 'you gonna spray or wipe?' Real casual. I said spray of course because that's what everyone does now. He just laughed and said he's been wiping his finishes for 50 years and never had a callback. I pushed back a little but he showed me a sample he had in his truck and honestly the depth was way better than anything I've gotten with a gun. Got me thinking maybe I'm overcomplicating things with all this equipment when a rag and some oil could do the job cleaner. Anyone else ever run into an old school method that made you question your whole setup?

2 comments

2 Comments

troy_wilson829d ago

Old timers really do be that way sometimes don't they? I mean, it's hard to argue with results.

jaken2329d ago

Man that's exactly it. It's like yeah the old school way might not be the fastest but they've been doing it since before we were born and it still works. My grandpa used to say if it ain't broke don't fix it and now I get why. All these fancy new methods come out every year but half of them just complicate things more than they help. The old timers learned from trial and error over decades not from some youtube video. There's something to be said for experience that just can't be replaced by a quick fix.