Will old shellac dust leave a glaze if wiped off with metho?

Having previously wasted a whole day sanding old shellac off just one chair I decided to take a quicker approach. As the finish is old, dark and quite powdery I thought a card scraper would be more practical. Instead of a day, I achieved better results within a matter of mere hours. (Or so I thought...)

When I scraped I removed all colour and any cloudiness underneath until I was at what I believed to be bare timber. I didn't want to scrape/sand further, not even to remove old dings or scratches as it's a fairly thin veneer in places and the dings are part of these chairs' character.

After brushing off the dust I gave the timber a quick wipe-down with a metho dampened cloth. That's where I parked up yesterday, intending to go out today and give it a light sand before moving on to minor repairs and sealing with dilute shellac today. (Final coats of shellac will go on later when all chairs are prepped.)

However, this morning when I went out to the shed I noticed that the chair has a glazed look to it. Almost as though I'd already patchily brushed on the first coat of dilute shellac as a sanding sealer. The glaze is the same colour as when I wetted the timber with metho... except that it hasn't dried back to matte.

I was fairly careful when I brushed it down to remove all the dust and little colour showed on the rag after wiping down, but would this glaze be caused by any remaining shellac dust/grain filler being dissolved by the metho?

If so, should I go out of my way to remove all of it when I do the light sand (which'd make it less of the "light" and more of the "sand" than I'd intended) or should I be able to generally ignore it and go ahead with a dilute coat of shellac as intended?

Any remaining shellac should be absorbed into the new coat I would have thought. It should be dilute enough that it won't alter the colour. Only guessing here though.

Thing with shellac is it 's in the timber as much as it is on the timber and basically what you did was to reactivate the stuff in the timber when you wiped down with meths.

A light wipe over with 1200 grit abrasive should rid you of any minor surface bits like dust or raised grain etc and should give you a surface ready for polishing.

For what it's worth. The best and quickest way to strip shellac is cheap paint stripper, scraper, steel-wool and metho.

Will strip off shellac back to raw timber in mater of 10 minutes or so. For turned and carved work paint stripper then scrub with warm to hot water containing dissolved pure soap. May foam up a bit dramatically but will work wonders.

Hope this is of some help or interest.

Cheers - Neil :U

Excellent! Thanks for that, Neil.

It's nice to know I was on the right track and I'll be much happier using steel wool than faffing around with papers.