Gel Staining Fiberglass Doors. How to use Gel Stains.

the Idaho Painter from Boise. In this video, we're going to show you how we go about staining a few fiberglass doors. We've got a fiberglass door on the back of this house. And then we got two front doors on the front that we're going to be staining with a gel stain and then clear coating. And then we got the door jambs themselves. They're actually wood door jambs. We'll be staining those door jambs, too. We're applying the gel stain. And you're just going to apply a thin coat with a nice soft brush. And then once you get a nice thin coat applied, we're using a rag to begin removing the gel stain till we get it to the color we want. And we're getting the brush strokes in the right direction going with the grain. And you'll just keep wiping it and dragging it with your brush. And then you'll just wipe your brush onto the rag, just taking off that excess until you get it to the darkness or the deepness you want. You're always wiping in the direction of the grain. Clean your brush off each stroke to get rid of the excess. We're using a Minwax gel stain. This gel stain is designed for fiberglass doors. It's good to work just one panel at a time. This is a six panel fiberglass front door with a window pane in it. We masked off the window pane with paper and frog tape so the gel stain won't bleed through to the glass. So, we're using a pretty 2 and 12 inch angled sash brush, an XL glide brush. And we started off using a natural bristle brush for oilbased products, but the brush is leaving too heavy of brush strokes. And we wanted a softer bristle brush, so it wouldn't leave brush strokes as much. And the Pretty XO glide brush, two and a half inch angled sash brush is actually working out a lot better. It's ideal to actually do these doors before they're installed, but the customer had them installed prior, so we had no choice but to do them while they're hung. Could take them down and do them, but then you got to flip them, and it's a lot easier just to have them on their hinges, masked off with frog tape. Once we get this door gel stain, it's got to dry 6 to 8 hours and then we'll actually test it to make sure it's ready to be clear coated. We're going to test it by just taking some mineral spirits on a rag or paint thinner. And then you'll just rub that rag onto the door. And if it takes off any of the stain, then the stain hasn't dried and cured properly and it won't be ready to clear coat. But should be able after about 6 to 8 hours, just wipe it with paint thinner and none of the stain should come off on your rag. Then we'll clear coat it with our Helmsman Spar urethane. And we're using a water-based satin urethane on these doors. We got this whole front side of the front door completely coated. Took us about 15 to 20 minutes to coat this side. Now, this is the next day. The doors have had overnight to dry. We stained the door jambs with Sher Williams BAC wiping stain and stained the doors with a gel stain. We've got a heater set up still to warm them up today to spray the clear coat because as you can see outside it's cold outside. We've got masking up and created a tent to keep the warm air inside here to be able to spray in with our water-based clear coat. We're getting ready to clear coat this door now. We're actually masking off the hardware with Frog Tape. Doing a few little touch-ups on it. We just set up a getting ready to set up our 440 in here to spray it with our Helmsman. We'll be setting some drop cloths down in here. Be using the Helmsman water-based product right here. we got the doors now finished. They've been gel glazed and clear coated with our Helmsman clear water-based barure. We've actually gel gel stained the doors with Minwax. We've let them dry for 2 days and we've come back today and actually sprayed them with our clear coat and it's dried about 30 minutes now. Here's a look at our doors from the outside.