Today we finish the tables.  I started by doing the finish sanding and final inspection.  I find that doing the thorough job of hand sanding a piece as the final pass of sanding is a great time to closely inspect the piece for any little thing that I may have missed during construction and assembly.  And corrections or adjustments must be made before shooting it with lacquer.

Following the sanding I moved the tables into the finishing room with the stand.  The stand only needed to be scuff sanded and it's final coat of lacquer, the trays will get three coats with a scuffing between second and third.  I do this only to provide a wonderfully smooth finish coat.

All that will remain to be done is to let the lacquer on the tables set up good and hard overnight, then I can apply a skim coat of high grade polyurethane to the tray tops - this protects the lacquer against "modern living".  So many folks these days are so accustomed to plastic coated furniture that they've forgotten (or never knew) how to care for fine furniture with a traditional finish.  The skim coat helps protect the tray tops from white rings that can form under sweaty glasses or hot dinner plates.  Lacquer does that.  The Poly takes at least 24 hours to cure out before I can package the tables or I risk the packing foam sticking to the poly and ruining the finish.  Don't want that!

Since these are essentially done, I'm going to post them to the web site as available so that payment can be accomplished and we will be ready to send them on their way Monday.  See you tomorrow.