Out of My Depth, and Right at Home

Three days at the Finishers Guild Gathering

"Rule number one of finishing: finishing is fun.
Rule number two of finishing: finishing is not fun all the time."
— Mitch Kohanek

There is a particular feeling you get in a room where everyone knows more than you do. I spent three days in that room last week, at the Finishers Guild's annual gathering outside Minneapolis, and I'd recommend it to anyone.

The Guild is a group of professional finishers, refinishers, and restorers from across the country, and the gathering is their one in-person meetup of the year, hosted this time by Robert Chickey at his shop, Bespoke Finish, in White Bear Township, Minnesota. Thirty-some people. No vendor hall, no keynote stage — just small-group skill shares, one after another, for three days, by people who have each spent a career getting very good at one corner of a very large field.

I have spent most of my working life as a software engineer. I came into finishing as a hobbyist woodworker, and into shellac as the owner of Shellac.net, which is a thing I've been for about six months. I had no business being in that room on the merits. I'm telling you this so you understand what I mean when I say I have rarely felt so welcome anywhere.

The firehose

I'll give you the range, because the range is the point.

Joe Amaral, who ran a wood-finishing shop in Fort Bragg on the Mendocino coast for twenty years, walked us through the ancient Japanese craft of urushi lacquer — a finish built from tree sap, applied in dozens of impossibly thin coats, cured in humidity rather than dry air, and refined over centuries into something that looks like deep water.

Our host, Robert Chickey, demonstrated micronized pigments — color concentrates so finely ground they behave more like dye than paint — and passed around samples of VeroMetal, a sprayable finish that polishes, ages, and patinas exactly like real bronze or iron or copper. The trick is that it isn't a trick: it's real metal, suspended in a binder, sprayed onto whatever surface you like.

Matt from Clean Armor showed a UV-cured coating that goes on wet and cures hard, non-toxic, and durable the moment you pass a glowing purple wand over it. I watched it happen twice and I still half expect it to be a magic trick.

Don Williams, for decades the Senior Furniture Conservator at the Smithsonian, presented. So did Mike Mascelli, who has spent forty-five years in upholstery — classic cars, period furniture, pieces that live in the U.S. House of Representatives — and who directs the Professional Refinisher's Group. Upholstery, if you're keeping score, is another whole continent inside the word "finishing" that I had barely visited.

And then Mitch Kohanek stood up to talk about color.

If you don't know the name, the people in that room certainly did. Mitch spent thirty-five years leading the National Institute of Wood Finishing at Dakota County Technical College — the only certified finishing program in North America — and a remarkable share of the best professional finishers working today learned the trade from him. He interned at the Smithsonian's conservation lab, he's been published in Fine Woodworking and American Woodworker, and he still teaches, at Marc Adams, at his own shop, and in professional shops across the continent. He is, by any reasonable definition, one of the greats.

He gave us a crash course in color theory so dense and so good that I left it fairly sure I no longer know what color anything is. I mean that as the highest compliment. And somewhere in the middle of it he said the thing I've been turning over ever since: "Learn to participate in the results and not just observe them."

Which brings me to the moment I did not expect: a master class in our own Merit shellac burn-in sticks. Randy Bohn and Tara Badertscher of Tara Lou Designs ran a repair bench — chips, dings, gouges in finished wood, melted in and leveled and colored until the damage simply wasn't there. I have poured thousands of those sticks this year. I had never watched two people who've spent decades using them show a room what they're for. I took notes like a student, because I was one.

The throughline

Somewhere in the middle of the second day, a slide came up in one of the presentations: a period room restoration. A sweeping staircase, paneled walls, and that glow — the warm, deep, slightly honeyed light that comes off old wood finished the old way. The whole room reacted. Not politely. Audibly. Everyone in that shop had seen a thousand finishes, and this one was familiar in a way that felt almost like relief.

Robert confirmed it afterward: the entire job had been done in shellac.

That was the thing I kept noticing. These are people who sell, apply, and in some cases invent the most advanced coatings on the market — UV-cure, liquid metal, catalyzed everything. And underneath all of it there was a near-universal, unforced respect for one of the oldest finishes in the world. Shellac wasn't the nostalgic exhibit in the corner. It was the venerable old master the others were still measuring themselves against.

Robert in particular — who I have decided is a mad scientist I need to spend a great deal more time with — is pushing shellac forward rather than preserving it under glass. He talked me through additives and blends he uses to make it more lightfast, more UV-resistant, and better suited to high-traffic and even exterior work. Three hundred years old and still getting new tricks.

What I had to offer

I did get a few chances to give something back. By the end of the weekend, most of the Guild had heard my case for button lac — the hand-pressed, barely-processed form of shellac that I think is the best-kept secret in the finishing world. And friction lac, the stick of shellac you press against spinning work on a lathe until the heat melts it into the wood, was new to a surprising number of people in the room. Several went home with friction sticks to try on their own lathes. If that's my contribution to a gathering of masters — introducing them to the most ancient, most beautiful, most durable way I know to finish turned wood — I'll take it gladly.

What I came home with

Mostly, gratitude. For the invitation, and for the hours these people spent handing over experience that is, in some cases, unique on Earth.

And a clearer sense of what I'm actually for. I'm not a master finisher and I'm not going to pretend to be one. What I am, increasingly, is a crossroads: between India, where the lac is grown and pressed by people who've done it for generations, and the craftspeople everywhere else who need it pure, uncut, and honestly labeled. And between all the individuals I met last week, whose knowledge rarely ends up in the same room.

The gathering reminded me that the most important thing in any of this is the connections — between materials and makers, between people who know things and people who need to. If I've found myself the facilitator of some small piece of that, I'm glad to spend my time on it.

Mitch's second rule is true. It isn't fun all the time — ask me about the week before the trip. But the first rule is truer, and his last line is the one I'm taking home: participate in the results. Don't just observe them.

Thank you to Robert, to the Guild board, and to everyone who answered my questions. I'll see you next year. I'll bring buttons.

— Gregg