I had always read that if you didn't whisker the wood before applying finish, the whiskers could stand up if and when the stock got damp or wet. Nobody wants that to happen! Well, when I first started finishing/refinishing stocks, I too sanded the wood to a 400 grit finish. Then I'd wet the surface really good and hold the stock over a red-hot stove burner to raise the whiskers. Then I too used 0000 steel wool to burnish the wood's surface to remove the whiskers. I generally did this three times before applying my first coat of BC Tru-Oil. I then used 0000 steel wool to cut the Tru-Oil finish off the surface back to bare wood and apply another coat of Tru-Oil. I kept that up until the pores were filled. I never de-oiled the steel wool, nor did I have trouble with little schnitzels of steel wool in the wood's surface, but my hands hurt after all that stock rubbing with steel wool! Maybe did over a hundred stocks that way over those years. Then a friend introduced me to #7447 Maroon Scotch-Brite pads. It's a woven nylon wool with a fine abrasive built into it, not nearly as abrasive as 400 grit sand paper. I started to mix up my own finish formulas by then too. My finishing method on new stocks evolved to eventually become an initial sanding of the wood with either 80 grit or 120 grit paper, then to 150-180, then to 220-240 grit. I'd wet the stock and use a heat gun to whisker the surface after the 120 grit sanding, and then dry sand with the next finer grit, and so on. I'd wet and dry the stock a third time and use a small square of the Scotch-Brite pad to burnish the surface one last time, to remove any remaining whiskers. I would then apply a sealer of my own concoction, and kept applying it to any dry spots that appeared for about 30 minutes, then I'd wipe any sealer remaining on the surface of the stock off and let it dry for a day, or two. Then I would cut a 1" square off the pad, apply a little finish to a small area of the stock and then lightly wet-burnish the surface to create a slurry of wood dust and finish to start filling the pores. After going over the whole stock that way, I'd wipe all the slurry finish off the surface with a paper towel and let it dry for a day, then do it all over again, until the pores were filled. The whiskering/drying the wood between normal sanding steps and wet-burnishing-in the finish goes much faster than wet-sanding and doing both saves a lot of time! Everybody has their own method of whiskering/finishing, and you'll like get as many different responses as the number of folks you ask about it! And, yes, in my opinion, it is well worth taking the time to do!
