Jarviser's "Easy French Polish" Method.

In the text "Polish" refers to Shellac in alcohol or "french Polish", either mixed at home or purchased ready made. I prefer the latter as it is usually smooth and reliable.
Proper "French Polishing" will also involve figure of eight strokes, beezers, oil, sulphuric acid, rottenstone and about 10 years apprenticeship and experience which I don't have! This method will get you 90% of the way there, although it is not proper french polishing as such.
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You may have heard of the French and English methods of french polishing. Well this is Jarviser's method of simple shellac finishing.
You need some cotton or poly-cotton cloth like an old shirt, some cotton waste (e.g. Liberon) which is much better than cotton wool, some garnet or clear pale shellac, and some meths. Washing up liquid bottles are very convenient vessels to hold them.
Apply some polish and a little meths to the cotton waste. Wrap the waste into a little parcel called a "Rubber". You have the correct amount of liquid in if the polish just oozes when gently squeezed. It should not drip out or tramlines will result, nor remain dry and drag up the previous coats of polish.
The polish is applied very THINLY in straight lines along the grain with long overlapping strokes. Each new coat of shellac will melt into the previous coat giving a solid waterproof and reasonably tough coat.
Keep the rubber in an airtight jamjar with a few extra drops of meths ready for use next time.


To get a darker colour without using stains, apply a couple of coats of thinned garnet polish to darken and even out the surface of the bare wood, without building up any "body" of polish. Building up a thickness with dark shellac polish can leave streaks if you are not very careful, and tramlines will show up vividly.

Golden rule of Jarvisers method is "Don't go over any tramlines or missed patches until the polish has dried at least 4 hours otherwise you could drag up two or three previous coats into a sticky mess."
Better to allow to dry thoroughly and then rub them down with wet-and-dry and repolish. If you are careful with overlapping and take care with the edges then there should be no need to go over it anyway.
After the two base coats have dried 12 hours, rub down with 400 or 600 grit wet+dry paper with a sprinkling of talcum powder. The talc prevents "measles" on the paper, which are little hard lumps of shellac melting onto the paper. These will make nasty scratches. I prefer talc to using it wet as water does not do much good to new shellac. Try to rub down to the bottom of the tramlines (brushmarks) without going through the film.
After several days of flatting down, a thin coat from the rubber, and 12 hours rest, a surface begins to build up. After the first three of four coats of garnet polish, start to build up with clear pale shellac polish. It means to get 10 coats of shellac you need at least 5 days!

Now Proper French Polishing will take less time than that. And I know how to do it, but then I know how to play a violin - you just put your fingers on the strings in the right place and rub a bow across - but when I play one it sounds awful because I have never had any lessons. Same with French Polishing.

You can either enjoy the shiny surface, or you can flatten with some 0000 gauge wire wool with some good quality wax polish to more of an antique sheen.

Of course you can throw a bunch of keys and some odd lengths of chain at it a few times, use black patinating wax into the grain and dents, and make it look really old. Just don't do it with any intention of selling a piece as older than it is, because that's serious fraud.