I bet it does look nice then. and you'd have the option of top coating it with shellac or poly if you wanted. That's the reason I use the danish oil rather than linseed oil. It hardens up a little faster and that material that soaks into the surface makes the surface beneath the coating harder and fills the tiny pores. The poly recommends that on the can for higher durability but it isn't a requirement.
You said the first application is buffed on, with the danish oil It says to soak it and let it dwell a bit before the first rub down, at that time it can wick in. after the first coat there is less absorption. what I do is add some linseed oil to thin it which in theory allows it to penetrate a bit deeper.
I wonder if you could do both, use linseed, tung or danish oil to penetrate for a while and then rub down , dry overnight, and then use the Rubio? that would only take a couple hours and cost would be minimal.
That might give one a chance to have a look at the floor after it pops the grain and you might have a chance to do any corrections to the surface before the Rubio gets buffed in, before the buffing machine is procured.
The result after finishing wouldn't be different but I think it might wear longer if it's a high traffic area. It would add a day to the job.
My friend who does a lot of commercial renos stops by once in a while and he always laughs because my jobs take so long.. he says I am always looking for ways to make the job longer! I once said to my ex wife that I enjoy working on the house so much I'll probably never really be finished. in hindsight it's probably best to think these things without opening your mouth
applying an oil prior tot he rubio might make it absorb less of the rubio. I guess there could be good and bad in that. maybe if the rubio has a lot of tint and you want it darker it would affect the color a little.
both oil based poly and shellac can be recoated without more than a scuff sanding, so long as you aren't using wax or especially furniture polishes and things that may have silicone. silicone will cause issues and if you use pam spray on your pans ( you can spray the aerosol around the house) , thats silicone. so is armorall. The real difference is that with shellac when you put more shellac on the new layer dissolves the underlying area and becomes one with it. Poly on the other hand is more like paint. It does not dissolve the underlying stuff, it makes a coating that is stuck through the mechanical bond. light sanding and cleaning are important just like with paint.
with lacquer there is a technique where one can refinish a piece of furniture by cleaning it and then padding on more lacquer. the lacquer performs similar to shellac , dissolving the underlying. In that you can trap the old dirt in or if your efforts involve too much dwell time or too much rubbing then you can get results that aren't optimum. restoring a finish like that can be difficult but sometimes with furniture its best not to do too much because you want to end up with a piece that retains the patina rather than making it look showroom new.
another thing Ive noticed is that if I take an old radio and wash the lacquer finish off with lacquer thinners, or use stripper, the stuff that comes off is more the color of a cup of coffee, its never really clear and it isnt' because it's got toners, its a product of age. so If I refinish radios I put some toner into my lacquer to tint it just a bit and this produces a finish more in keeping with what I feel an old radio should look like. Even if it had perfect storage like on grandma's sideboard it would still be darkened from natural aging.
with floors I dont' really think quite the same way but some may want to do things like this to mimic the look of age in their floors rather than making them too new looking.
I've tried with success putting a teeny bit of stain in the danish oil but there is a gotcha here. You have to be careful because what happens is that where there are cracks or roughness in the wood, they latch onto the pigmments as you rub it in and sometimes that can amplify the defects. for that reason I always do the first coat with the dwell time in clear to fill the voids, and then if I want it a little darker I use the oil with just a teeny bit of stain until I reach the color I like, then seal that in with a clear topcoat, if desired.
with recoating uncured poly there is a little gotcha there too. if the underlying is not cured, and if you sand through, then near the area where you sanded through, the poly is micro thin. then when you put the new coat on you can get a line where it sort of fuzzes up and forms a circle where this micro thin area is. Its because the solvents are creeping under the old coating where it is micro thin. what you do is keep going , do a light sanding and flatten it out, then it disappears. the first time I saw this affect I thought hey whats going on here? but it isn't really hard to fix. thinning it more makes it worse because then there are more solvents.
the same issues with sand through happen with other coatings like laquer. To avoid It when I do lacquer jobs I try to put enough down before I start with any sanding so that it's hard to sand through. also don't block sand but instead use a soft pad or steel wool. you want it to follow the contours, fill tiny voids, but not flatten it out at that stage. If you were to sand a floor with a machine it would cut through near the areas where the boards have high spots and you would never have a completely flat and perfect floor because the boards move. Its not like a tabletop where it's glued up into one block and immovable. a floor has to expand and contract because its so big.
i remember when I did my attic and I did fill most of the cracks but not all , knowing it had to move. Later I was in the room and heard a loud crack.. what had happened was two of the boards released from each other. it didn't cause a visible issue but one of the cracks freed itself because of the forces of expansion. if the floor is in an area where it sees humidity changes it may be more important to leave more or wider cracks for movement. I did get away with filling much of the cracks but you have to keep some of them because of this. Ive seen videos of guys doing a whole fill by troweling over the entire surface and that's a lot faster than the way I do it. i just make a decision on each one, whether to fill or not and if I do then I put tape either side of the crack, blend my filler colors and press it right down into the crack with a putty knife. then I pull the tape off right away. the putty then humps up a bit along the crack. then after I sand flat it makes up for the shrinkage of the filler. I like to use a card scraper and put fresh tape either side of the crack for the scraper to run on. then I scrape it down to the level of the tape, then remove the tape and it's minor sanding to get it truly flat.
Initially I had people saying you cant' fill cracks, the floor needs to move. I have found through my experiments, yes you can , just not all of them. the wider the boards are , the more they move. and a 100 year old floor will often have developed big cracks because the wood over that 100 years is very dry and has shrunk a lot. they will never go tight again so there is bigger gaps than the floor needs.
when I had a little flood in the kitchen and it got under the rubber mats the wood had a chance to really soak in. since I had used water based filler I then realized it can redissolve if it gets wetr and what happened is that it squeezed back out a little in some spots and when it dried the cracks were back. one area where it had really soaked in the boards humped a little due to pressure but when it dried they shrunk back and all went back to normal. If the filler gets wet it turn into wet filler. If you have water based filler that is dried out you can reconstitute it, it takes a little mixing but it doesn't seem to affect the product. If you try using it outside it will turn to mush so then you need waterproof filler. the oil based filler is harder to work with because the solvents evaporate and it it dries up in the can as you work with it. You can add more solvent but it's a bit more fussy.
Bonnie is hiring it out so she probably just wants it done so much of this detail isn't needed I know.. and my apologies in advance for repeating myself and being so long winded.. I guess I just find it interesting and since it took me a lot of researching and experimenting to realize some of what I had struggled a lot with information I was initially told wasn't correct, I feel the need to pass it along. the woodworking and wooden boat forums have a lot of good finishing tips. My dad was a cabinetmaker and I work with a lot of joiners a lot. I try to keep asking questions. the old man at mohawk was a really good resource for me and actually at home depot I found a really experienced flooring guy who worked in rentals. He took some interest in explain a lot of the ins and outs of it. Every time I buy some product or rent something I try to have a few questions in my mind and then try to weigh it all up, sometimes repeating the same questions to see if others give the same info. so much is opinion related.
the thing with finishing is you ave all these choices of products and if you talk to the companies or sales people they want to talk about their product but it is hard to find info on how the products play into each other.
If you called the Rubio reps they might not be very open to saying things like what would happen if you used an oil first, they would probably just say that you'd void the warranty. People don't often follow up on warranties on stuff like finishing products anyway.
