I’m calling it finished. It really is horrible if you look closely or feel around the wood. But it’s hidden generally out of sight. And most importantly it really fulfilled my learning goals. By putting a couple layers each of stain, sanding sealer base coat and a urethane top coat for the tops and bottoms of all the pieces I did quite a bit of HVLP spraying.
I decided to go with water based materials at the same time as deciding to do spraying and buying a book on finishing. Now that I’ve read the book I understand that water based is harder to use than other bases, but why not start with the complicated route and try to conquer it? Certainly for the stain it was not easy to get the pigment sufficiently dissolved without adding water and thinning the stain past where it was ideal for spraying…it made me want to get a magnetic stirrer like in high school chemistry and photography class. I’d have done better to spray the stain much thinner, even at the cost of many more coats and 2 hours lag between each. In the end I globbed it on, not caring because it was going to be out of sight. The pre-catalyzed urethanes on the other hand were very easy to work with in a water base. I probably could have sprayed them on thicker even and they dried easily in 45 minutes. The biggest plus I thought was straight forward clean-up and very little fumes. There was essentially zero odor/fumes with the stain. The urethanes were a bit fumey so I wore a respirator, but by that point I was reasonably practiced at getting the minimal amount of spray to do the job compared to the stain. On the first coat I probably sprayed as much stain on the drop cloth as the wood.
I think I could attempt staining the TV stand now without being too worried.
