This is good advice with respect to oil finishes which tend to be very forgiving.What I do is keep applying coats until the wood does not absorb it anymore. It is really hard to go wrong but you will never get a gloss finish. The downside of pure oils is that they take a long time to dry completely and can be prone to pick up dust unless you can keep them in a reasonably clean environment for a while. Many products that are sold as “oil” finishes are not pure oil and sometimes mixtures of oil and varnish to speed up drying which just makes things more complicated.
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I use Liberon Finishing Oil or Tung Oil quite a bit, and with enough coats I find I can get a good sheen. I once recommend it to a friend and he put so many coats on his kitchen worktop that you would think he had used gloss polyurethane varnish, but that’s an extreme case.
Re. drying time, oil/poly mixes seem to be widely used in the US, but I’ve rarely seen them here in the UK. That, I think, is very different to a pure oil which has just had a drying agent added to speed up drying time. I generally prefer to leave 24 hours between coats in any case. The finish should then be dry enough that you can rub it down with fine wire wool, so that takes care of any dust that may have landed on the wet surface.
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