How to fill holes in wood with wood epoxy

We recently refinished an antique pine harvest table for our dining room – yay! After many months we can finally offer our guests a place to sit while eating again! The final step of the project required filling the holes on the bottom of the table legs so we could install new wheels (sadly, we’d lost one of the old ones so they couldn’t be salvaged).

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We were set to use Bondo, as we had in the past, which you can read about here. However, a helpful man at Lee Valley suggested a wood epoxy instead. Curious to see if this would work as well as Bondo, we decided to give it a try. And oh, if you’ve never visited Lee Valley you should! It’s a great store for furniture refinishing products.

We used Quick Wood wood epoxy. This is a super cool product! You don’t need to measure and mix two parts together like most epoxies. Instead, Quick Wood comes out like a tootsie roll that you just have to smush together to activate. If you don’t have a Lee Valley near you, you can get this very similar product here on Amazon.

Here are the 5 easy steps to follow to fill holes in your wood furniture using
Quick Wood wood epoxy:

Step 1 – cut the wood epoxy roll

Wearing gloves, use a utility knife to cut a chunk off the roll a little larger than the area you’re looking to fill;

Step 2 – smush the epoxy into a putty

Smush that roll together using your fingers until it feels more malleable. It will take a couple minutes of smushing;

Step 3 – fill the hole

Push the mashed putty into the hole. You’ll only have about 15 minutes before it starts to harden, so make sure the hole is nearby and ready before you start the smushing process. You should overfill a little bit;

Step 4 – let it dry

Let it dry for at least 30 minutes. Read a book, wash the dishes, do whatever your heart pleases while you wait.

Step 5 – sand

Once it’s dry, you can sand down the putty until you get a smooth, flat surface. We didn’t bother with our table leg since it won’t be visible and the filling was simply to have something to drill into.

Once you’ve sanded, you’re ready to drill or paint your filled area. Although
Quick Wood says you can stain the product, it has to be an opaque stain as it will not take stain the same way as the surrounding wood. Paint is definitely a better option.

We were surprised at how fast and easy it was to fill the wood holes with
Quick Wood. Not only was it fast and easy, it was much less messy and smelly than using Bondo.

Our biggest concern was the adhesion. Would Quick Wood stay in place or would it pop out or crumble like wood filler? We’re pleased to report that Quick Wood bonded fantastically with the wood. We drilled the new holes and screwed in our new wheels with no hiccups.

We’ve haven’t tried Quick Wood on smaller, flat voids, like those on chipped veneer. For those types of repairs, Bondo is likely a better choice because it is more fluid and can “seep” into the void a bit easier (as long as you haven’t added too much hardener). Quick Wood is also slightly more expensive, so it’s not the best choice if you have a very large space to fill.

Only one small problem left to tackle with our dream harvest table…how do we stop it from rolling? (Update: March 2020, we used these to stop the rolling!)