bshillam":3tdxuqqg said:
One thing to check: Are you sure they are dust/particles, or could they be very miniscule bubbles? Way back when, I was doing one of my first varnishing jobs, and no matter how careful I was (I wasn't in a booth, but I was in a "varnish room" that was reasonably clean although not surgically clean), I kept ending up with specks when I came back the next day to see the previous day's work. I figured it was dust, so I re-doubled my efforts with cleaning, wetting down, straining the varnish, ever-better brushes, etc. Then I'd do another coat. The specks remained!
This was before it was easy/common to find things on the Internet, but finally I ran across something (might have been in a magazine) that mentioned that if a piece was heating up as the varnish was drying, there could be a slight "off-gassing" that would create tiny bubbles. Well sure enough, it was late fall, and I'd turn on some heat when I arrived that would run while I was varnishing. So the wood probably was still heating up as my varnish was drying. Next coat I varnished while the wood was in a cooling cycle, and "Voila!" my "dust particles" were gone. So they were actually tiny bubbles from the wood heating up and outgassing as the varnish dried. I just wondered if you might be experiencing the same thing, since it's fall and maybe you had heat on, or were varnishing in a place or time of day that had the wood heating up as your finish was drying.
The side benefit from my long quest to eliminate the specks? My brightwork had 12+ coats on it by the time I solved the problem :lol:
Sunbeam :hot