It Must Be Getting Close

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Historic Transparent Finishes – The Rough Cut

I recently watched and approved the low resolution rough cut for my soon-to-be-released video, “Historic Transparent Finishes” (or is it “Transparent Historic Finishes?”  I can never remember).  Anyway, David Thiel and Rick Deliantoni of F&W Productions (The Popular Woodworking video folks) did a good job of capturing the action.  If nothing else, we were efficient.  As I recall, we shot about fours hours of video, and the rough cut is just under 3-1/2 hours long.

Here are a few snapshots of the computer screen from the video.

Not too surprisingly to anyone who knows my interests, the video will revolve around shellac finishes and wax finishes, including all the old favorites like polissoirs, brushing shellac, “French” polishing, and such.

The outline for this video, in fact the outline for almost everything finish-related that I do, is “Don’s Six Rules for Perfect Finishing.”

I think I might show it to the participants for the upcoming Professional Refinishers Group retreat at the barn in three weeks.

That’s another thing I can check off the list.

Shellac Archives Announcement

My name is Don, and I’m a shellacaholic.  The topic of shellac and its uses and performance has been a near-constant focus of mine for the past four decades.  One result of this interest has been my compilation of hundreds of documents with thousands of pages dealing with those very same topics, ranging from manufacturer’s brochures to articles in the popular press to arcane monographs so esoteric that their audience has been nearly invisible over the decades.

One great advantage (?) to electronic self-publishing like blogging is that there is no governor on the enterprise beyond one’s own energies.  That capacity allows me or anyone else to go anywhere their ideas take them.  Which of course brings me to the topic of this blog – my shellac literature archive.  In recent years I have been scanning and digitizing these files, and I am not close to being finished yet!

With Jason’s help I have established a special section within the Writings section to house this archive.  Over the coming few dozen months I will be uploading my shellac archive, one document per week or so.  Some weeks it will be a stand-alone document, some weeks it will be a consecutive series of chapters from shellac treatises.  This will be the shellac world’s analog to the old-time serialized novels.  All tolled I think I have about 200 things to post (if stacked up it would be about a four-foot-tall pile), but the final number will depend on how I chop them up.

The first entry is, appropriately in this centennial year, the 1913 trade brochure, “The Story of Shellac.”

Finishers’ Retreat Weekend 2013

I am not sure if two events establish a tradition, but I am hoping that is the case.  For the second year in a row I set aside a weekend in May to host one of the local Chapters of the SAPFM with whom I am involved to gather at The Barn for a weekend of fellowship and woodfinishing.

The first weekend of May 2013 The Barn hosted a “Finisher’s Retreat Weekend” for the Chesapeake Chapter of the Society of American Period Furniture Makers. I co-taught the event with old friend DaveR from Knoxville. The premise for the weekend was for each participant to bring a completed furniture making project and we would finish it together. Together Dave and I led them through the Six Steps for Perfect Finishing, beginning with preparing the surface of the workpiece and wrapping up with a glorious artifact portrait of their piece on top of Franklin Floor.

Since the task for each participant was to arrive with a recently constructed piece awaiting the final, transformative finishing processes, the range of projects was broad and the quality of workmanship exceedingly impressive.  Between my ministrations on surface prepping, wax finishing and brushing shellac, and Dave’s instructions  and demonstrations with spirit varnish pad polishing and traditional asphalt coloration, and the continuous cross pollination, great progress was made on each project.

I look forward to May 16-18, 2014, where we can perhaps cement the new tradition for SAPFM members to come finish the pieces they built over the winter.