How to Finish MDF

MDF has excellent and uniform structural properties, but does not have the natural, beautiful wood grain appearance and texture of natural wood. The face of MDF is smooth and dense, and is easy to coat with paint or stain, while the factory edges (or any cut edges) are more porous and will soak up a lot of paint or stain. You can use a variety of paints or stains; the trick is to seal the MDF first, then build up layers of paint or stain. Both paint and stain can be finished with a gloss coat to make the MDF look like high-end wood. I stained an MDF tabletop with dark stain to simulate wood grain, then flood-coated it with tabletop epoxy.

You can stain it or paint it, but you want to be careful not to use a finish that will wear off on the thread. If you're not familiar with primer and paint techniques, a stain would be an easy way to seal the wheel and make it look beautiful. The tricky part will be getting stain into the triangular cut outs. The inside edges will soak up a lot of stain, so they will be darker, and it will be tricky getting the stain into the cut outs. The two outer faces will be easy to stain, and the thread groove will be easy to access, but will soak up a lot of stain. A hard gloss coat will seal the stain and give the thread groove a low friction finish.

Stain soaks in much more; it's meant to be porous, so stain is better. Paint sticks.