Re: Use the BLO
Dave Mount
>Depending on how open grained the wood is and whether a plane is the final finish, you can do it as part of your finishing with BLO. Just take some fine sandpaper and apply the BLO with it. Rub a little with the sandpaper to work up a slurry and push it into the cracks, then wipe off the excess slurry. The BLO acts as a binder and keeps the slurry secure in the crack as the piece dries. Finish the rest of the piece at the same time.
The dangers here are that with open grained woods, the slurry will fill the pores and change the look of the wood in the areas where you do this. The second issue is that if the final surface is planed and not sanded, sanding one area may subtly change the surface where you do the sanding.
If you don't want to do the filling in the finishing step for one or more of the reasons above, you can still use the BLO as binder to make a "putty" out of your wood dust. Just be careful not to spread it around too much if you have open grained wood. Using the same finish as you intend to use (BLO) as a binder will make it unnecessary to clean up the area around the fill with anything more than a wipe of a rag.
If these dovetails join two contrasting woods, I'd recommend using the darker wood to do the filling, but you need to watch that you don't get too much of the fill contaminating the lighter wood. If you do, a couple strokes of a plane afterward should clean up any surface contamination.
The pic below shows a drawer with a fill where I overcut the baseline on the drawer side between the two tails. In this case I filled with the birch dust from the drawer side because the birch was more open grained than the cherry. However, using the lighter wood made the fill more obvious; you can see it as a light line at the base of the middle pin. It was something of a lazy fix that could have been much less obvious if I'd put more work into the patch.
My $0.02,
Dave
