I’m in the middle of a sequence matched wall panel job in white ash veneer.

One of my employees wrote all over the faces of a few panels with a permanent marker, thinking he was labelling the backs.

Any suggestions on removing the ink, or am I screwed?

Acetone is solvent for sharpie but my guess is it will bleed out and cause a big mess. Major bummer. Gotta love employees.

A real craftsman would upsell the client to Ebonized Ash.

Screwed

Make sure another sharpie ever gets in the shop. Stupid to have them around. Chalk, any color, should be the only thing around except for pencils.

I have honestly even had issues with guys with pencils marking up face material. Bearing down hard, then telegraphs through after sanding. I honetly never understand why people put marks all over face material that is very near finish. If its going to go through the sander or planer fine, but marking up even solids on a close to finish face...

Guy thought he was on the back face... but..

There are some furniture touch up guys that can work some magic and hand draw grain and color in, depends on the lettering, how big it is and where you are.

Otherwise replacement panels.

We mark edges, we draw an arrow on the bottom edge (if the supplier doesn't) before cutting pointing to the face, once there is edging / coating /finish on the panel then they label the back.

We use pencil on the top or bottom edge after banding and before finish.

Develop and maintain a system. We sometime get G1s panel with the back the same materiel but a different match or same match, some veneers its hard to tell.

Some are simple but when we do a random match sometimes the back "looks" better than the face. Its like the old adage measure twice, cut once.

Employees need to check and make sure before they mark.

The attached panels had pretty bad field damage and grooves in them, the touch made it impossible to see.
Unfortunately I had to resize the picture to post it and it lost a lot of detail.

View higher quality, full size image (3024 X 2268)

I'd be tempted to remove the employee with a strong solvent.

Does the company that did the layup have the log available? We lay up a lot of panels, when we do a big deal matched table or wall panel sequence, we keep the log around until the project is installed.

Take a sample board and replicate the ink mark. Try acetone but blot it, don't rub. If it comes off and still has a grey look, try Try oxolic acid to bleach it. If you are staining the project, you might get lucky.

Otherwise, the guy who said you're screwed wins the day

My honest attempt at a nightmare possibility for a save would be to use a shop vac with a pencil type tip and a squeeze bottle applicator to flood the sharpie and the shop vac sucks the solvent and sharpie out.

I see it as a total failure as there will still be bleeding, you will likely have marring/burnishing on the face from the shop vac. And then you will be best to wash all the panels with acetone to solvent blend them all together but the halo of the marker could still rear its ugly head on the very last coat of finish or 3 minutes after install.

Painfull.

The problem is, you may not know what shows until its in the room it goes in with different lighting and installed.

At that point you have fixing labor, fabrication labor, finish labor, delivery and installation.

If the cost of the panel material is $320 each and that's $960 materials.Then the fabricated and installed cost of labor is $3200 in labor and OH.

If doesn't work, you spend the $4160 (failed first time fix, rejected after install)
again so spend up to $7,360 to save 960, if it was the other way around I would do it in a heartbeat.

I would put a few hours into 1 panel and see if I could save it and then order replacement panels.

Cs:

I would wonder if any of the chemistry used in dry cleaning would have an advantage over any of the solvents that we typically have lying around.

Perhaps your local store might be able to help, as they tend to have success in removing stains like this without leaving a residue.

Can't hurt to ask. Hope this helps.
TonyF

Dry cleaners used to use acetone, they still might. But nothing is going to remove 100% of the color.

The solvent in permanent markers is alcohol not acetone. Acetone will work as well as any aggressive solvent like toluene or xylene.

It’s kinda like alcohol is the solvent for shellac. But acetone will aggressively attack shellac.

I agree with everybody else. If you can’t sand it off you are doomed. Try your best to not castrate your employee.

The problem is we use markers on all kinds of other things around the shop. That and blue tape. I can’t say I’ve ever had the inclination to write on wood with a marker. It wouldn’t even be legible.

Dry cleaners used to use carbon tetrachloride--doubt you can find that around anymore. Probably on the same warehouse shelf as DDT :)

We had a sequence match job that had two panels get damaged beyond repair. We ended up buying an entire unit and going through it looking for the best match we could find. Got lucky and found really good matches but expensive.

I'm coming in late on this post and really don't have any more to offer as to how to fix this anyway. I want to make a comment about Mark B's suggestion to use a shop vac to suck up a solvent sprayed onto the work piece. Very bad idea. Shop vacs don't necessarily have totally enclosed motors and you risk a fire or explosion doing this!

One more point, the solvent may melt down the plastics in the shop vac and ruin it permanently.