Spackle or Bondo? Painting perfect kitchen cabinets

this christy idaho painter here on paint live tv today we're going to be talking about when to use spackle versus when to use bondo glazing putty i get questions all the time you know when to use one or the other and there are times and places for both of them we've got some cabinets we're refinishing here with uh large knots it's naughty alder on the back sides that's never been filled so which one would you use and why we're gonna talk about that in this video so stay tuned [Applause] [Music] all right here we are we've got um multiple doors right here that we're working on a cabinet uh repaint refinish and the front sides of these doors they were refinished the knots were already filled but the back sides they were never filled and i think it's you know professional to film on both sides now we've got large holes we've got small nicks and dings you know when would you use and what would you use where so when we're filling a large hole like this spackle is great for filling large holes because spackle doesn't shrink very much spackle is softer than glazing putty so there is a difference to when you want to use them but if i was to try to fill this whole with bondo glazing putty it's probably it shrinks a lot so it's probably going to take at least three coats to fill this hole so i don't want to sit there and wait around and fill sand fill sand so i'm going to start off by backing it with crawford's interior exterior spackle i really do like crawford's interaction or spackle for doing my initial fill it's a great product it dries really hard it sands really fast but large stuff like this one coat one coat of spackle is what we're gonna be doing i'm gonna trowel it on there those big holes and put a nice heavy coat of it on there so it actually fills them and we have something to sand now there is smaller holes on here that i don't want to fill with spackle and why is that spackle is a lot softer than bondo glazing putty so these type of small holes it'll be easy for your sander to pull that out of there and not get an ultra flat finish so we want to take small nicks dings holes seams stuff like that we're going to use bondo glazing putty to do the filling on there it's going to put a dab of bundle glazing putty on you know a piece of cardboard anything could be a stir stick a piece of wood i like this cardboard right here because it's coated on the one side it doesn't cause the bondo to dry out so fast now i'm going to just begin filling my holes cracks seams with bondo glazing putty and then we'll let that dry it's probably going to take about 30 minutes for both these dry we'll sand it and then our spackled holes will be needed to be backed with one coat of bondo glazing putty and that's going to give you an amazing flat finish we're after the ultra flat factory finish on this wood so you've got to fill all this stuff that we see i'm using an inspection light right here one of the great things about an inspection light is it shows you all these nicks and dings with the naked eye if you didn't have an inspection light a lot of this stuff you're not even going to be able to see you can get these inspection lights we do have them on paint life supply co and you can take and mount it on a table you can i got it mounted on a one by three piece of trim right there so i can move it around the inspection light does tilt angles up and down to cast the light just the way you want it but i even got where my hinges left indentations gonna want to fill all that stuff so there it is the difference between using spackle which is softer bondo glazing putty which is harder don't confuse this with bondo itself this is bondo glazing putty which is what goes over the top of bondo if you're filling and doing large holes or large dents on automobiles bono glazing putty is absolutely amazing you can use it to get rid of brush strokes you could skim it over a door if there was brush strokes stipple marks uh microscopic nicks and dings seems stuff like that absolutely amazing so you got to have both of them if you're doing the professional looking amazing cabinet finishes if you got any tips or tricks you know that you use when it comes to finishing cabinets just leave it down in the comments section below don't forget if you enjoy our videos give us a thumbs up we really appreciate that it keeps encouraging us to keep making these videos to help you guys out you know in creating the ultimate cabinet finish like a pro and like we always say we'll see you next time right here on paint life tv [Music] you