Sharon Que writes:

I attended the class at DCTC with Don Williams  and Mitch Kohanek and it is changing my
world!  I’m in a profession which can not be learned at any
University.  My education comes through working and summer workshops.
I’m deeply grateful to have found out about the classes at DCTC
because to have such excellent instruction and facilities is rare.
The ability to make a highly technical subject understandable, even
more rare. 

Understanding transparent finishes is so important to me because that
is what the customer sees and bases all other internal and invisible
work on and it is so much more technical than the underlying wood
repairs.  We learned about solvents, while intouching what are the
priorities, gels, Teas chart,  why we should care about molecular
weight, barriers, decals for crackeluer, detergency, wax, air
scrubbers and of course no class would be complete without some
discussion about hide glue and shellac.  I’m using the information
already.

Thank you Don and Mitch,

Sharon Que

~~~~~

John Hurn writes:

I was fortunate enough to be part of the class last week. What a great
week! This was finishing for the insatiably curious. We went beyond
the “what” and ventured into the “why”. There is something enormously
satisfying in beginning to understand just why and how detergents do
what they do.

There were many very practical applications associated with what we
were learning. For example, we were able to make a gelled stain using
water-borne shellac as a binder. The power of this is that one need
not be tied to commercially available stains. One can begin to think
about formulating stains with the precise characteristics needed for
the specific application. For me, this was just too cool.

My warmest thanks to Don Williams and Mitch Kohanek for a very helpful class.

I’m looking forward to next summer’s session. If you are interested at
all in really digging into these topics in some depth, I encourage you
to consider attending next summer.

John