I Hate Pore Filling

However, it's pretty essential if you want to go for a glassy piano like surface. High gloss brings out the most color and depth in wood. This is because a satin or semi-gloss surface achives its affect by scattering light back to the viewer's eye, and this scattered white light creates the whitish glow on these finishes, and it's that whitish glow that obscures detail (including flaws!) and reduces contrast, making colors seem more dull.

When working with wood that features chatoyancy, where the play of light on the fibers of the wood creates different colors when changing the angle of view towards the light, the best finish to maximize this effect is going to be a flat as flat, glossy finish.

One finish I have used often lately starts with a mix of 75% tung oil and 25% polyurethane, thinned with mineral spirits. This is applied like a danish oil, flooded, and rubbed in for 15 minutes, then dried off by hand until the surface is clear of any oil. This is then left a day to dry.

On the third coat, I use wet/dry sandpaper and sand the wood. The slurry of tung, polyurethane, and wood dust has a lot of body, and when wiping this coat dry, wipe at 45 degrees or 90 degrees to the grain of the wood. This will leave a lot of the slurry in the pores, filling them up after a session or two. The wood here is Purpleheart and it has very large pores. This is the fourth coat of the tung/poly mix. It takes a few days to get this done, but the eventual results are worth it.

I build some middle coats once the pores are filled with a mixture of 5:1:5 poly:tung:mineral spirits, this is a wiping varnish. The final coats finish up with a 2:1:1 poly:mineral spirits:naptha wiping varnish. The naptha blows off quickly and is only there to ease application. I don't want this too lacking in body because runs and sags can develop when wiping on. The mineral spirits stays to help with leveling and bubbles for a longer period than the naptha does.

The final finish following this schedule is quite dramatic. Here are a some pictures of two tables I built previously and completed with this finish.