A Long Square Dance History…

 

[Originally written for Happy Hearts Square Dance Club (Regina, SK) Spring, 2021, newsletter.]

A long dance history…

Sheila seems to consider that Elaine and I are sort of guest members, twice removed, and sends us the weekly newsletter, so I’ll jump in with another story. It won’t be short because our dance history is a long one, so grab a cup or glass of your favourite relaxing beverage and read on.

Beginning near the beginning…  

I dropped out of school to join the Army in 1965. After doing my basic training in Petawawa, Ontario, I spent the next two years in Victoria studying music full time at the military band school there. In 1967 I decided that being a musician in a military band was not a life I was interested in, so I transferred to the Air Force. After some more training in Montreal and Trenton, Ontario, I was posted to Moose Jaw.

Elaine and I started square dancing at a beginner square dance class in Moose Jaw in Fall, 1969. In fact, it was at that beginner square dance class that we met.  The caller, Ken Lee, was Elaine’s principal at the time – this was very early in her teaching career. He had persuaded Elaine and another young lady teacher to give square dancing a whirl.

At the same time, I had been whining to a lady I worked with that there were no interesting social activities for a young guy in a place like Moose Jaw. She and her husband were planning to be angels for the beginner class so she suggested I attend. I always enjoyed dancing so she didn’t have to twist my arm too hard.  Elaine and I met there and were dating regularly by the end of the class.

After graduating from beginners, we joined Town & Country Squares. Ken & Joyce Lee had just started it. Over the next four years we danced there and travelled a great deal with Ken & Joyce. There were a lot of clubs in smaller towns around Saskatchewan at that time. Most didn’t have full time callers so callers from the larger centres helped out as guest callers.

Shortly after we started dancing at Town & Country, a Flight Sergeant who happened to be a caller, was posted to Moose Jaw. Elaine and I helped start a club on the air base. We called it the Air “4” Sets.

Summer of 1970, I decided 5 years was enough of the regimented life of the military and went back to being a civilian. Elaine and I had become pretty serious by then and had started talking about getting married … at least, I was.  Elaine had one condition: I had to go back to school so I could get a decent job and make something of myself. That seemed like a reasonable request, so I went to night school that winter to finish my high school and then took the Computer Science program at Saskatchewan Polytech (It was STI back in those days).

We Move to Regina...

I started with SaskTel in Regina in 1973. After a winter of commuting to Regina, we decided it made more sense to move to Regina.  We started dancing with St. James Squares at St. James United Church that fall, where Art & Hazel Johnson were the caller couple. Art was a very easy-going, laid back person, so dancing there was loads of fun. We also visited other clubs quite a bit.

Sometime around 1980 we decided to start round dancing. We joined the Rhythm E’s. Howard & Neoma Johnson were the cuer couple.  We loved that Howard & Neoma treated round dancing as formally as what it’s supposed to be: Ballroom dancing with cued choreography, not just another form of social dancing. We always felt it made us better dancers.

When St. James Squares disbanded, we moved to Whitmore Pioneers. Whitmore was both Mainstream and Plus at the time. Norm & Helen Woods were the caller couple. Norm is one of the smoothest callers we’ve ever danced to, before or since. Later the club decided to become just a Plus club because there were no Plus clubs in the city and still quite a few Mainstream clubs.

Whitmore Pioneers does a Restart...

When Bill & Shirley Treleaven retired as caller couple for Whitmore a few years ago, a large number of the members – who were of the same vintage as Bill & Shirley – decided to retire, too.  We went through a number of changes over the next few months. Our membership was down to less than two squares so we couldn’t afford to stay at Whitmore United. We eventually ended up at Grand Coulee, thanks to Elwood and Denise Scott.

Thanks to Ron Hopkinson’s efforts that first winter, we were able to keep going with recorded music.

Val & Lane Wright from Moose Jaw agreed to call for us the following year but they are only available half time. We still dance to recorded music on alternate weeks. Barry Gruell, Elwood Scott and I (aka “The Ungrateful Dead”) do the deejaying and teaching on those nights.  Prior to COVID we had grown back to four squares most weeks. 

Traveling Again...

The past few years Elaine and I have done more traveling outside the province. Elaine’s cousin from Powell River, BC, is a square dance caller and we’ve enjoyed dancing with them in various places, especially lots on Vancouver Island. They persuaded us to try the Penticton Peachfest quite a few years ago. It’s almost a week of square and round dancing with folks from all over western Canada and the northwest US. They have a marvelous line-up of callers. This past summer would have been our 10^th time there.

It was great fun watching the teens dance in Penticton. There were enough of them until a few years ago that one afternoon was dedicated to them. We older folks were welcome to dance with them … if we thought we could keep up.  Not easy, trust me!  One of Elaine’s and my most memorable single dance moments was a Quickstep round dance we did with them one teen afternoon. It was a hoot! And took probably an hour to recover from.

A number of us from Whitmore have been going to Red Deer each fall to dance at the Western Workshop with its creator Jerry Jestin, before he retired, and then with Gary Winter who took it over. We typically have at least a square or more from Whitmore.

For the past few years, Alberta’s Square & Round Dance Federation has been hosting a four-day event in Calgary, Edmonton, and Red Deer. Each year they bring in a renowned guest caller for it. The past two trips out there we’ve had up to two full squares from Saskatchewan, including dancers from Regina, Moose Jaw, Yorkton and Lloydminster.

That brings us up to the present …

This (2020-21) is Elaine’s and my 51^st dance season and, despite COVID – or maybe because of it? – we’ve been dancing more this past 10 months than we have in years.

In April, 2020 we discovered that a caller from Calgary, Lorne Smith, is calling Virtual squares online via Zoom. We started dancing with his Mainstream (Wednesday) and Plus (Thursday) sessions. At around the same time we discovered that Mary & Bruce Nelson from Edmonton are cuing round dancing online so we’ve been dancing a couple of nights a week (Phase II Friday and Phase III Monday) with them.

When the weather warmed up in May we started dancing those sessions on our driveway with a few other couples – one couple per “square” - until it got too cold and dark in late October.  We danced right through the summer.

The Zoom dancing has been pretty special in its own way. Both the round dancing and the square dancing usually have between 30 and 50 or more connections each session. Lorne Smith’s Virtual square dancing has a real international community. There are dancers from all across Canada, all over the United States, usually four to six connections from Australia, and one to four from Japan. Last week Lorne’s guest caller was a lady in Japan.

It’s interesting to discover, if you didn’t already know, that English is the universal language of square and round dancing. You can go anywhere in the world and dance without knowing the local language. One or two of our regular Virtual square dancers from Japan don’t speak any English but are still having a great time.

Recently, we decided to start Virtual dancing for Whitmore Pioneers via Zoom to try and keep our skills from vanishing completely, and to stay in contact with each other. The first night we had three squares (12 couples) online, which was quite gratifying for this deejay!

Elaine and I plan to continue to find ways to keep dancing. And we look forward to the day we can see everyone across a real square again.

The Final Word, honest…

One last observation that occurred to me only recently: From the time we started square dancing in 1969, Elaine and I were always the babies: the youngest, or among the youngest, dancers in any club we were in. That is, until Whitmore’s “restart” in Fall, 2016. Now, all of a sudden, we find ourselves among the senior citizens of dance around here, both age-wise and dancing career-wise.  Elaine figures that’s a good thing for square dancing: that there are lots of younger dancers who are now involved in it and promoting it.  Let’s keep it going!!

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I take no credit for the following article. It's simply something I like to revisit from time to time. It makes me work a little harder at trying to get out of any reactionary mode I may have been into lately and try to see the other point of view. I'm never entirely successful. And perhaps I should take a serious look at trying some proper mindfulness exercises. But I'm not that disciplined, more's the pity. So I've put it here to make it easier for me to get to when I feel the need to ease up some.  I hope Mr. Wright and his publishers won't mind.

Oh yeah, if the Canadians in the crowd start feeling morally superior due to the title, please note your own cognitive biases. It is not something that is limited only to our southern neighbours!

Here's the link to the original article in Wired:

https://www.wired.com/story/why-pure-reason-wont-end-american-tribalism

WHY PURE REASON WON’T END AMERICAN TRIBALISM

AUTHOR: ROBERT WRIGHT

WIRED: IDEAS

04.09.18    07:00 AM

Robert Wright (@robertwrighter) is an Ideas contributor for WIRED and the author of Nonzero, The Moral Animal, The Evolution of God, and, most recently, Why Buddhism Is True. A visiting professor of science and religion at Union Theological Seminary, he publishes The Mindful Resistance Newsletter.

IF YOU HAVEN’T encountered any reviews of Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker’s new bestseller Enlightenment Now—which would be amazing, given how many there have been—don’t worry. I can summarize them in two paragraphs.

The positive ones say Pinker argues convincingly that we should be deeply grateful for the Enlightenment and should put our stock in its legacy. A handful of European thinkers who were born a few centuries ago set our species firmly on the path of progress with their compelling commitment to science, reason, and humanism (where humanism means “maximizing human flourishing”). Things have indeed, as Pinker documents in great detail, gotten better in pretty much every way—materially, morally, politically—since then. And if we stay true to Enlightenment values, they’ll keep getting better.

The negative reviews say things like this: Pinker attributes too much of our past progress to Enlightenment thought (giving short shrift, for example, to the role of Christian thinkers and activists in ending slavery); his faith in science and reason is naive, given how often they’ve been misused; his assumption that scientifically powered progress will bring happiness betrays a misunderstanding of our deepest needs; his apparent belief that secular humanism can fill the spiritual void left by rationalism’s erosion of religion only underscores that misunderstanding; and so on. In short: In one sense or another, Pinker overdoes this whole enlightenment thing.

My own problem with the book is the sense in which Pinker underdoes the enlightenment thing. In describing the path that will lead humankind to a bright future, he ignores the importance of enlightenment in the Eastern sense of the term. If the power of science and reason aren’t paired with a more contemplative kind of insight, I think the whole Enlightenment project, and maybe even the whole human experiment, could fail.

If you fear I’m heading in a deeply spiritual or excruciatingly mushy direction—toward a sermon on the oneness of all beings or the need for loving kindness—I have good news: I’ve delivered such sermons, but this isn’t one of them. Eastern enlightenment has multiple meanings and dimensions, and some of those involve more logical rigor than you might think. In the end, an Eastern view of the mind can mesh well with modern cognitive science—a fact that Pinker could have usefully pondered before writing this book.

Pinker’s argument is more sophisticated than some caricatures of it would have you believe. In particular, he recognizes the big kink in his famously optimistic take on the future: Though reason can help us solve the problems facing humankind, our species isn’t great at reasoning. We have “cognitive biases”—like, for example, confirmation bias, which inclines us to notice and welcome evidence that supports our views and to not notice, or reject, evidence at odds with them. Remember how unseasonably warm it was a few months ago? The answer may depend on your position on the climate change question—and that fact makes it hard to change people’s minds about climate change and thus build the consensus needed to address the problem.

Pinker also understands that cognitive biases can be activated by tribalism. “We all identify with particular tribes or subcultures,” he notes—and we’re all drawn to opinions that are favored by the tribe.

So far so good: These insights would seem to prepare the ground for a trenchant analysis of what ails the world—certainly including what ails an America now famously beset by political polarization, by ideological warfare that seems less and less metaphorical.

But Pinker’s treatment of the psychology of tribalism falls short, and it does so in a surprising way. He pays almost no attention to one of the first things that springs to mind when you hear the word “tribalism.” Namely: People in opposing tribes don’t like each other. More than Pinker seems to realize, the fact of tribal antagonism challenges his sunny view of the future and calls into question his prescriptions for dispelling some of the clouds he does see on the horizon.

I’m not talking about the obvious downside of tribal antagonism—the way it leads nations to go to war or dissolve in civil strife, the way it fosters conflict along ethnic or religious lines. I do think this form of antagonism is a bigger problem for Pinker’s thesis than he realizes, but that’s a story for another day. For now the point is that tribal antagonism also poses a subtler challenge to his thesis. Namely, it shapes and drives some of the cognitive distortions that muddy our thinking about critical issues; it warps reason.

Consider, again, climate change. Pinker is not under the illusion that many members of his (and my) climate-change tribe are under: that people in our tribe have objectively assessed the evidence, whereas climate change skeptics have for some reason failed to do that. As with most issues, few people in either tribe have looked closely at the actual evidence. On both sides, most people are just trusting their tribe’s designated experts.

And what energizes this trust? Often, I think, the answer is antagonism. The more you dislike the other tribe, the more uncritically you trust your experts and the more suspiciously you view the other tribe’s experts.

For purposes of addressing this problem, a key link in the tribalism-to-cognitive-distortion chain is this: The antagonism is directed not just toward the other tribe’s experts but toward their evidence. Seeing evidence inimical to your views arouses feelings of aversion, suspicion, perhaps even outrage.

If you don’t believe me, just observe yourself while on social media. Pay close attention to your feelings as you encounter, respectively, evidence at odds with your views and evidence supportive of them. It’s not easy to do this. Feelings are designed by natural selection to guide your behavior automatically, without you reflecting on them dispassionately. But it’s doable.

And, by the way, if you manage to do it, you’re being “mindful,” as they say in Buddhist circles. Mindfulness involves being acutely aware of, among other things, your feelings and how they guide your thought—an awareness that in principle can let you decide whether to follow this guidance.

If earning the label “mindful” isn’t enough of an incentive for you, how about this: The foundational Buddhist text on mindfulness, the Satipatthana Sutta, says that complete and all-encompassing mindfulness (of feelings, physical sensations, sounds, and much more) brings full-on enlightenment—the utter clarity of apprehension that is said to entail liberation from suffering. So to become a bit more mindful as you peruse social media is to realize an increment, however small, of enlightenment in the Buddhist sense of the term.

Or, to translate this back into Western talk: an increment of making-inroads-against-cognitive-biases. So long as you remain truly mindful, you will be less inclined to reflexively reject evidence at odds with your views, less inclined to uncritically embrace—and impulsively retweet—evidence supportive of your views.

One take-home lesson from this mindfulness exercise is that the term “cognitive bias” is misleading. Confirmation bias isn’t just a product of the cognitive machinery, a purely computational phenomenon. It is driven by feeling, by affect. You reject evidence inconsistent with your views the way you reject food you don’t like or the way you recoil at the sight of a spider. The thought of embracing unwelcome evidence makes you feel bad. You may even have an urge to, in a sense, attack it—find the critical factual error or logical flaw that you know must be propping it up. Evidence that supports your views is, on the other hand, attractive, appealing—so much so that you’re happy to promulgate it without pausing to fully evaluate it; you love it just the way it is.

This view of cognitive biases is consistent with a decades-long trend in psychology and neuroscience (a trend that was anticipated by Buddhist psychology eons ago): the growing recognition that the once-sharp distinction between cognition and affect, between thinking and feeling, is untenable; thinking and feeling inform one another in a fine-grained and ongoing way. I assume Pinker knows this at an abstract level, but he doesn’t seem to have really taken it onboard.

That, at least, could help explain why his prescriptions for combating cognitive biases sound less than potent.

He wants schools to do more effective “cognitive debiasing”—to cultivate “logical and critical thinking” by encouraging “students to spot, name, and correct fallacies across a wide range of contexts.” Back when I was in high school, we did exercises very much like this in English class, and they blessed me with an enduring tendency to … look for such fallacies in arguments made by people I disagree with. Period.

And, actually, human beings are pretty good at that even without special instruction. The problem isn’t that natural selection didn’t bless us with critical faculties; it’s that our feelings tell us when to use those faculties and when not to use them, and they do this in a way that typically escapes our conscious awareness.

Pinker also has some ideas specifically geared to cognitive biases that surface in a tribal context. He suggests changing the “rules of discourse in workplaces, social circles, and arenas of debate and decisionmaking.” Maybe we can “have people try to reach a consensus in a small discussion group; this forces them to defend their opinions to their groupmates, and the truth usually wins.” Or get “mortal enemies” to “work together to get to the bottom of an issue, setting up empirical tests that they agree beforehand will settle it.”

These things don’t sound very scalable—even leaving aside the question of how long any of the supposed benefits would last in the wild.

I’m not saying these proposals are worthless. And I certainly agree with Pinker that no student should graduate from college without learning about cognitive biases. (I’d also encourage college students to read this book, which, like all of Pinker’s books, is a model of sharp analysis and clear exposition, an example worthy of emulation whether or not you agree with all of it.)

Still, if I could implement only one policy to solve the problem Pinker wants to solve, it would be the teaching of mindfulness meditation in public schools. One virtue of this approach is that it doesn’t involve convincing participants to buy into some high-minded goal like collaborating with “mortal enemies.” Indeed, the practice of mindfulness meditation often starts as simple self-help—a way to deal with stress, anxiety, sadness. The path from that to, say, more mindful engagement on social media is, if not quite seamless, pretty straightforward.

The path to full-on enlightenment is, of course, a bit more tortuous. Happily, the salvation of humankind doesn’t depend on anyone in the next generation actually getting there. (I’m agnostic on the question of whether anyone ever has gotten there.) One of the most underappreciated aspects of full-on Buddhist enlightenment is the sense in which it is a state of complete objectivity, an absolute transcendence of the perspective of the self: a kind of view from nowhere. And from the very beginning of a mindfulness meditation practice, there can be gains along that dimension; as you get less reactive and more reflective, you can, in principle, get better at objectivity, bit by bit by bit.

And note one bonus of this approach to combating cognitive biases. By addressing the antagonism that underlies them, mindfulness can make direct inroads on the more obvious threat posed by tribalism—the conflicts that kill people, the simmering tensions that keep them from getting together and solving problems like, say, the proliferation of nuclear and biological weapons.

The great Enlightenment philosopher David Hume—who used careful introspection as part of his methodology—famously wrote that reason is “the slave of the passions.” Pinker doesn’t quote this line. He does note that Hume and other Enlightenment thinkers were “aware of our irrational passions and foibles” and says they saw that “the deliberate application of reason was necessary precisely because our common habits of thought are not particularly reasonable.”

But I don't think the “deliberate application of reason” is by itself up to the challenge. After all, our minds are designed to delude us into thinking we are being reasonable when we’re not. It is only when we make it a practice to look carefully at the mechanics of the delusion—look at the way affect steers reason, the dynamic Hume so vividly described—that we have much hope of solving the problem. And if you want to do that, if you want to actually look at those mechanics and see them at work in yourself, then reason alone isn’t going to do the trick. If you really want to see these things, I recommend that you start by sitting down and closing your eyes.

Meeting of the Minds

·        Is mindfulness meditation a capitalist tool or a path to enlightenment? Or is it both?

·        Either way, it might just be able to save America from its plight of political polarization.

·        And speaking of polarization: If you really want to understand people who think differently than you, you would do well to have that conversation offline.

AUTHOR: ROBERT WRIGHT

WIRED: IDEAS
04.09.18    07:00 AM

The Annoyance of Algorithms

"WE OWE A lot to 9th century Persian scholar Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi. Centuries after his death, al-Khwarizmi's works introduced Europe to decimals and algebra, laying some of the foundations for today’s techno-centric age. The latinized version of his name has become a common word: algorithm."

TL;DR:  At one time our view of algorithms was as very useful tools. But our awareness and understanding of "algorithms" is changing.  We are starting to view them as something more negative as they are used to determine what we view in online sites, like Google searches, Facebook newsfeeds, YouTube viewing recommendations, etc.

Here's the full Wired article

https://www.wired.com/story/2017-was-the-year-we-fell-out-of-love-with-algorithms/


... and this just appeared in the New York Times

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/10/opinion/sunday/youtube-politics-radical.html

Fuel Costs vs. Vehicle Total Cost of Ownership (TCO)

Fuel Costs vs. Vehicle Total Cost of Ownership (TCO)

This is about fuel cost as a percentage of TCO.

Why it Matters:

I have often heard people make the observation that they should buy a new car with better fuel mileage so they could save money.  Of course some folks are merely rationalizing.  They want a new car just because they want a new car.  But they are not comfortable trading off a perfectly good vehicle for no other reason than they want a new(er) one.  So they rationalize the purchase.

But, surprisingly, some people actually believe this foolishness: that trading off a perfectly good vehicle for one with better fuel mileage is something that makes economic sense.

The Reality:

I just calculated the latest fuel consumption numbers for the Honda CR-V we had for 9 years and I thought I would share the actual numbers in case you're interested.  (I track all my vehicle expenses and have the costs categorized.  Yeah.  A little OCD going on here...)

I know this won't be news to a lot of folks but sometimes the actuals are interesting.  For anyone to whom it is news, pay close attention.  Please.

This is for a 2007 CR-V purchased new in November, 2006.  All expenses are to October, 2015 when we sold the vehicle.

Fuel Cost:      $22,466.59
Other Costs:  $58,118.46   (purchase price, finance costs, maintenance/repairs, licensing)
Total Costs:   $80,585.05

Total Kilometres: 199,141

Fuel cost per Km:  $0.11
Total cost per Km: $0.41

The fuel costs are currently 27% of the total cost of owning the CR-V. 

To the point:

Fuel costs after 9 years of driving were still only 27% of the total cost of owning the vehicle.

For perspective, the annual licensing cost (plates and insurance) plus the annual trip to the dealer for regular servicing are nearly equal the total amount of fuel that gets run through the vehicle in that same year.  If it requires service twice in that year, or a new set of tires, the non-fuel operating costs just blew right past the cost of fuel for the year.

And we haven't even included the amortization of the purchase price and finance costs.

Look at it another way.  Let's assume I could buy a vehicle that gets me, say, a 20% improvement in fuel consumption.  That's an improvement of 20% of 27% (the overall fuel cost percentage).

That's only a 5.4% improvement in total cost of ownership.

But, oops, it's actually much worse.  We also need to consider the cost (purchase price and financing) to acquire that new vehicle for its improvement in fuel consumption.

And the increased licensing and insurance costs of a new(er) vehicle.  And...

Yes, when you look at all the numbers it just keeps getting worse.

Using Wipe-On Poly

Wipe-on polyurethane is a hard, easy-to-apply finish with a lustre that ranges from a satin sheen to a bright gloss. Until recently, it was the secret weapon of only those who knew the recipe. Now it’s on the shelves of every paint store, hardware or home centre under brand names such as Minwax and Varathane. While it’s just about the most idiot-proof finish on the market, there are still a few tricks to using it successfully. If someone had been able to give me an idea how this stuff works from start to finish before I began using it, I would have saved myself a lot of time learning by my mistakes.

Test Pieces...

The first thing I recommend is to use lots of test pieces. Perform the finishing schedule as you expect to do it for the finished piece (More on possible finishing schedules below). If you're in no hurry you can do a couple of test pieces through the entire finishing schedule first to see how it works out. I suggest doing this with two pieces because there will always be times when you ask yourself questions like, What happens if I use 220 grit, then 320 grit, or if I just jump straight to 320 grit? Or what happens if I get a little heavier with the next coat (or two or...)? 

Once you gain a little more experience, or are in a bit of a rush, you can just use one or two test pieces and do each step one step ahead of the real piece. That is, do the first coat on the test piece(s) but don't do the first coat on the real piece until you're ready to do the second coat on the test piece. Seems a bit more work but this simple extra step can save you a lot of work in the end! (Don't ask how I know...)

It's probably obvious but I'll say it anyway... Always use the same wood for your test piece(s) as the real piece. If there are suitable pieces from the same board(s), that's ideal.

So here goes...

Sand the wood through the grits you plan to use. (Up to150 or 180 is fine enough unless you have a specific reason to go finer.) Then apply the number of coats you think you will need. Test pieces are especially important if you have no idea how many coats will be required to achieve the finish you are seeking.

Be aware of the recommended “recoat” time on the can. It’s typically two to four hours, but will vary according to the temperature and humidity in your shop. If you apply a following coat in approximately the recommended recoat time you do not need to sand before every new application unless you have a specific purpose, e.g. to remove any dust nibs or other roughness. In any event, wait until you can slide a finger over it without it sticking. If it’s sticky to the touch anywhere, don’t recoat yet. If you plan to sand before the next coat, be sure to wait long enough that sanding produces a fine white powder.

If you wait significantly more than the recommended recoat time, e.g. ten to twelve hours or longer, then you need to sand before the next application. Each layer of polyurethanes (oil- or water-based) bonds to the previous layer mechanically, sort of like epoxy, so there needs to be some “tack” or “tooth” for the mechanical bond. If you are only sanding because you waited longer than the recoat time, - e.g. you had to get some sleep! - you only need to scuff sand. That is, use a fairly fine grit – say, 220 or 320 – and sand very lightly. Remember, each coat of wipe-on poly is very thin. You don’t want to get aggressive and sand through the previous coat for no reason.

Consider using Gloss for all but the last coat or two, even if your goal is a satin sheen. “Satin” and “Semi-Gloss” urethanes have particles in them to dull the finish. If you use them for the entire finish you can end up with a finish that might not have as much depth as you want.

A characteristic of wipe-on poly that makes it so user-friendly is that it is very thin. This is what makes it easy to apply and allows it to dry quickly. But if you are accustomed to using paint and regular polyurethane finishes that are done in a coat or two, you need to be aware that wipe-on poly might take two or three coats before you even start to see a film building on the wood. That’s just the way it works. Don’t panic and start sloshing the stuff on. It dries quickly and the application of multiple thin coats is the way the finish is intended to be developed. It enables you to sneak up on just the quality of finish you want without fear of runs, or of overshooting and making your piece look like you dunked it in plastic.

I use cast off cotton/polyester sheets or t-shirts for wiping pads. I generally take a piece about 6” x 6” and fold it so that no raw edges are left out to come unravelled and leave threads in the finish. To make it easier to hold, I picked up a 7” curved hemostat to hold the folded pad. That way I can use it almost like a paintbrush and I don’t need to wear gloves.

A hemostat looks like a pair of scissors but it has jaws like mini pliers and the handles lock closed. You can get them in drug stores and even surplus stores like Princess Auto in Canada.

SAFETY HAZARD: I toss the pad after every session (two or three applications). Do not throw the damp pads in the garbage or you risk starting a fire from spontaneous combustion. Open the pads up and let them sit somewhere to dry completely before discarding (two or three days to be safe). You can toss them on a concrete floor or into a bucket of water. You should take this precaution with rags that have been used on any finish with oil in it.

Don’t be afraid to brush wipe-on poly when that seems to make the most sense. Getting the first sealing coat on a large flat surface is an example. Just don’t overdo it and do watch for runs. I use artists’ brushes to get into corners and tight, odd-shaped spaces.

Example Finishing Schedules...

Here are a couple of examples of finishing schedules that I use. They hit two extremes so yours will probably land somewhere in the middle.

The first example is my daughters wedding card box.

She wanted it to have a natural look and feel. "None of that shiny plastic look, Dad."

To start, I sanded to180 grit. I did two coats of wipe-on poly spaced about 2 hours apart in the first session and then left it overnight.

The next morning I sanded very lightly with 220 grit - just enough to take any roughness off but not enough to take the wood grain feel away from it – and applied one more coat of wipe-on. I let it dry completely (24 hours) and gave it one last very light touch with 320. Just enough to take the dust nibs off. It looks natural and feels like wood, but it has a soft sheen that will last, and enough protection for something that will be looked at more than it will get used. She loves it.

The hardest part of that finishing schedule was combating the urge to do “just one more” coat. This is where the test pieces are so important. I knew that just one more coat would produce an obvious film build-up … just the look my daughter did not want.

The second example is the one I use for most of my band saw boxes.

My band saw boxes get an average of 8 to 10 coats, sometimes more. I want them to have the finished surface completely smooth and a deep but not glaring finish.

The first session will get two or three coats and then dry overnight. I will normally sand after the second coat to knock off any grain and get as smooth a surface as possible – usually with 220 grit. At this point I’m using the poly more like a sanding sealer. It will sit overnight after the second or third coat, depending upon how close it’s getting to bedtime!

Because the recommended recoat time has passed, in this session they get sanded in preparation for the next coat. It will be either 400 if they are already reasonably smooth, or 320 then 400 if they are a bit rough. Then I'll put two or three more coats on. In this session, if I get started early enough in the day, and if the film is starting to build relatively evenly after the second coat of the day, I'll let it dry enough to sand, usually around four hours. I’ll sand with 400 or 500 and put a third coat of the day on. If it's not yet building evenly, I'll skip the sanding before the third coat, and then let it sit overnight.

The next morning, it needs scuff sanding before the first coat of the day. I sand first with 500. If necessary, e.g. if there are some fairly open pores in the grain that need to be levelled out, I might sand an entire coat off. (Remember I said I want this thing smooth when I'm done.) With this particular finishing schedule I’m using the poly as grain filler until I get the surface perfectly smooth. With difficult woods, if the grain is not filling as rapidly as I expected, I might even use 400 grit to take the finish back almost to the surface wood.

If the surface is becoming level and smooth, it will be a similar day to the previous. I’ll do two or three more coats. They will go quickly because at this point the film has built evenly, and all I'm doing is any final levelling that's needed, while watching for the depth I want. (This is where the test pieces prove invaluable. Do a test piece right along with the project piece. If you do each step on a test piece and check the results before doing it to the project piece, you can see what will happen before you risk screwing up the project piece.) I might decide to stop after two if it's looking close, or it might get the third. Again it sits overnight.

This should be the final session. Sand with 1000 or 2000, depending on how smooth it already is. (Remember, I said this was an extreme example!) 1000 if I think it needs levelling out a bit. 2000 if it's ready for the last coat. If it's ready, it gets the last coat.

Shiny or not...?

Sheen is a matter of personal preference. I don't like gloss for many woods (although some, like the cherry box above, demand a nice glossy finish). So I use gloss for everything up to the last coat, then switch to satin. Sometimes I'll do two coats of satin if required to kill the glare.

Instead of applying a coat or two of satin, you can do the same thing by “rubbing out” the final coat. Wait at least a day or two for the last coat to cure well. Give it a very light sanding with 2000 or 1000 sandpaper (I use Abralon sanding pads for the really fine grits) or 0000 steel wool on the last Gloss coat instead of switching to satin. Remember that last coat is very thin so don’t get aggressive and take it off. You just want to soften it to a lustrous sheen.

On the other hand, if you make to sell, be careful that your own preferences don’t over-ride those of your customers. Lots of people really love gloss, so finishing some of your pieces to a very high sheen could result in sales you probably wouldn’t have made if you offered only satin.

Sanding...

I do two kinds of sanding in finishing sessions. If I'm simply scuff sanding to take off the dust nibs and scuff it for the next coat, the touch is very light. Very light! You want to take any roughness off, so it’s smooth to the touch, and produce just a bit of tooth for the next coat to grab onto, but you do not want to actually sand any finish off.

If I'm trying to level it, then I'll get more vigorous. I don't usually want to sand back to the raw wood, but I'm not concerned about going back into previous coats. The one thing you really need to watch out for here is that if you sand back a coat, you pretty much need to take that entire coat off the whole piece. If you are doing a really nice job of finishing, if you don't take the coat off the whole piece, or at least in the visible areas, you may end up with the edges between coats showing up. If I didn't do a good job of filling the pores of the wood in the early coats, it isn't unusual for me to sand it nearly back to bare wood and cycle through two coats and sand them off, two coats and sand them off until I'm satisfied with the surface before continuing on and letting the film build up.

There is lots of room to experiment with wipe-on poly, and it is forgiving. However, I hope this helps you get through the learning curve a little quicker than I did.

Special thanks to Brian Knodel in Dawson Creek, BC. We went through this learning process together, and shared a great deal of both the joy and pain of finding out what does and does not work.