Hi there,
I volunteer at a community bicycle shop, and do some carpentry for them. They have a number of work benches which haven't been refinished in forever. They are fairly well seasoned, in that they often get oil and grease spilled on them. The fronts of them are starting to get eroded from use. There's talk of refinishing them with polyurethane, which will probably hold up fairly well and the tops would probably have to be replaced when they are refinished again after that. The big concerns for the finish are durability, dry time and VOCs. The finish will only have at most a day to dry, and there's a consensus that no one wants to be working in a VOC-laden shop.
Personally, I am thinking it would be interesting to sand them, then paint them with a milk paint, then cover them with a low VOC polyurethane like Polywhey.
Suggestions, thoughts?
I've attached a poor photo of one of the benches. We recently did a big clean up, this is the bench after about two hours of scrubbing and washing, it was waxed with some lee valley blue label paste wax. I don't think I'd buy that stuff again, way more VOCs in it that I thought was necessary.
I volunteer at a community bicycle shop, and do some carpentry for them. They have a number of work benches which haven't been refinished in forever. They are fairly well seasoned, in that they often get oil and grease spilled on them. The fronts of them are starting to get eroded from use. There's talk of refinishing them with polyurethane, which will probably hold up fairly well and the tops would probably have to be replaced when they are refinished again after that. The big concerns for the finish are durability, dry time and VOCs. The finish will only have at most a day to dry, and there's a consensus that no one wants to be working in a VOC-laden shop.
Personally, I am thinking it would be interesting to sand them, then paint them with a milk paint, then cover them with a low VOC polyurethane like Polywhey.
Suggestions, thoughts?
I've attached a poor photo of one of the benches. We recently did a big clean up, this is the bench after about two hours of scrubbing and washing, it was waxed with some lee valley blue label paste wax. I don't think I'd buy that stuff again, way more VOCs in it that I thought was necessary.