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Elmer's Wood Filler

by Stefan Jones

As seen in MAKE 02 Toolbox

Type(s): Household Product, Raw Material
Tags: wood filler elmer's

$2 (US, estimated)

Tool photo.

I build a lot of models from balsa and basswood. These are grainy, porous woods that soak up paint and look awful unless filled and sanded. I've tried a lot of fillers through the years, and they've all lacked something. Some require many coats. Others are a bear to sand. The best I've found is Elmer's Wood Filler. It can fill the grain of most woods with one coat, dries quickly, sands beautifully, and takes paint nicely.

You can find this versatile stuff in almost any hardware store. It comes in light and dark color varieties, in small and large tubs. It's water-based, fairly benign, and easy to handle. I've used it out of the tub as a gap-filling putty and thinned down as a brush-on filler.

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DIY woodfiller
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For some applications, I like to make my own filler - just mix some wood glue, or even plain old white glue (e.g. Elmer's) with some sawdust (preferably from the wood being filled). This gives you full control over the consistency, and it blends in very well.

This works great for smaller applications like balsa models, as well as with MDF and particle board (I recently was cutting an intricate shape out of particle board, and broke a dime-sized chunk off a corner. The glue-and-sawdust method quickly created a new corner that was indistiguishable from the rest, since after all that's pretty much all particle board is!)
Posted by GoneFission on July 11, 2006 at 17:15:41 Pacific Time