We’ve been plugging away on getting the new standing desk done for the front office at Fiberglass Supply. I had considered a number of different coating solutions for finishing it off including casting more resin over it to get a bar top coating, oiling it, or topcoating with a paint product. In the end I decided to go with Duratec Sunshield topcoat.
Duratec Sunshield is a catalyzed polyester topcoat with UV inhibitors in it that cures to a hard durable surface. It can be sprayed or brushed although spraying will tend to give better results. Once cured it can be sanded and polished.
I wanted a thick coating so I jumped over to the material calculator and entered to calculate how much material it would take to get a 1/16″ (.060″ or 1mm) thick coating. The top is 74″ x 24″ but I used 76″ x 26″ to account for the sides. This gave me a total volume calculation of 65 fluid oz or about 1/2 a gallon. I set it to .02″ per coat which gave me a total volume of about 22oz per coat. In the end this was actually really close to what I used.
Back lit with blue LED Lights
The first coat was pretty rough, but I expected that as I was going over bare wood. That’s OK though, after it cured I went over it with 220 grit paper and knocked down the fuzzies and rough spots. One thing I would have done different though is mixed up a small batch of sunshield ahead of time and squeegeed it over the knot holes to fill them.
The second coat I had some issues with contamination in the air line (I thought I was hooked up on a filtered line and I wasn’t) that resulted in fisheyes in a relatively large area that I wasn’t happy about. There were also some others related to where knot holes were located.
On the third coat again I sanded out the top with 220 grit removing the mild orange peel and shallow fisheyes, in the deeper fisheyes I got in with a red scotchbrite pad and roughed them up. This coat went down nicely. It still had a mild orange peel so I’ll block it down and buff it.
Before getting to that though we set it up in the office on its legs and through some blue LED lights under it to see what it will look like.
