Yesterday brought the close of the Workshop Era at the Barn on White Run, due to my previously recounted business insurance cancellation. We had a grand time working in the world of historic finishing.
The students undertook my now pretty-much-locked-in-stone curriculum for the three-day class, a syllabus I settled on many years ago. It involved lots of surface preparation with pumice blocks and polissoirs, brushing shellac varnish, melting beeswax, scraping, pad polishing, rubbing out, and making some hand-made sandpaper.
I believe a good time was had by all, with much learning, fears overcome, and confidence instilled. The results are a feast for the senses.
I will be teaching the same workshop in a few weeks over in the Charlottesville area at Wood and Shop.
Here’s a quick reminder about the two upcoming workshops focusing on shellac and wax finishing.
The workshop at the barn (my final one here due to my already recounted business insurance termination) will be June 19-21. For that workshop contact me directly.
The identical workshop will be held at Joshua Farnsworth’s school/shop in Earlysville VA, July 17-19. Contact Joshua for registration and other information.
I hope to see you there.
Not too long ago I needed to do some precision layout on brass stock for making some specialty squares and patterns for assembling the Roentgenesque parquetry units for the tool cabinet. (Those projects will be on these pages shortly.) Try as I might I could not find my bottle of Dykem, the standard layout dye for the metal working trade since the days of the Mayflower. So being in the hinterlands on a Saturday afternoon, I made my own.
The starting point, not too surprisingly, was a dilute solution of lemon shellac (given the amount I needed it turns out to have been way too much). I started with a deposit of the shellac flour adequate to cover the bottom of the bottle fully.
I then filled the bottle with ethanol to dissolve the shellac. To this I added some Trans Tints until the chromatic intensity got to where I wanted.
And with that, I was done. The bottle I now have will certainly last me long into the afterlife, I should have only made about 1/10th as much.
I am certain that as soon as I complete these projects my original bottle of Dykem will be in plain sight.
PS We are finally back to Shangri-la after three weeks of time with the family. L’il T is just a gas. Once we get the yard dealt with (literally knee deep) I’ll be resuming my “normal” routine.
A couple weeks ago I had a terrific three days teaching “Shellac Finishing” to members of the Howard County (MD) Woodworker’s Guild. A good time was had by all, but alas I left my camera behind so I have no pics to chare.
My teaching calendar for the remainder of the year is as follows:
May 20 The H.O. Studley Tool Cabinet and Workbench banquet presentation for the Annual Meeting of the Early American Industries Association, Staunton VA
June 19-21 Historic Woodfinishing 3-day workshop for the regional chapter of the Society of American Period Furniture Makers, at the Barn
July 17-19 Historic Woodfinishing 3-day workshop at Wood & Shop, Earlysville VA
August 21-23 Introduction to Parquetry 3-day workshop at Wood & Shop, Earlysville VA
I hope to see you there.
It’s been a while so I thought I’d take a minute to catch up on the doings at donsbarn.com/shop, the product page of the undertaking (all of this — blog, writings, and store — are an amusement/ hobby).
I have enacted a slight increase on some of the pricing to reflect my increased costs for both the polissoirs but mostly for postage. Those changes are already now in place or will be very shortly. If these modest increases make my products un-sellable, that information feedback loop will be instructive to me to discontinue the enterprise. I hope that is not the case but the future will tell.
The product line itself will remain unchanged for the moment until I can get some new things finished (see below). NB: for those of you who care about and base your purchases on such things, my products are provided by hetero-normative cis-gendered folks of European ancestry and hillbilly inclinations; we use brown polyester or tan linen bindings on the polissoirs based on my original work with the Roubo translation project (I do not deal in the books themselves, you can get them directly from Lost Art Press), non-recycled paper and standard printer ink for the labels. I am resolutely idiosyncratic/redneckian in every aspect of my life, and if that disturbs you, well, I cannot fix that issue.
The beeswax is commercially obtained as raw wax (I’ve been told the slang term of art for what I buy is “slum gum”) which is then hand process purified. All the bees involved in the production are now dead; the bodies for a great many of them are part of the contaminant that must be removed. The shellac wax is obtained directly from a purifier in India. Mrs. Barn and I (42 years this summer!) do 100% of the wax product purifying, formulating and packaging. I have received several requests to create some paste waxes of differing formulations and I am doing some explorations of that.
I think I have solved the problem I was having with Mel’s Wax, the archival furniture care polish we invented at the Smithsonian (Mel was my friend and co-worker who is the patent holder), and that may be available for purchase in the immediate future. Stay tuned on that one. I still won’t ship it to California. At one time I thought it would be the cornerstone for my post-retirement activities, but it never caught on.
Until now the videos have been purchased wholesale from the folks who made them at Popular Woodworking, but they no longer produce physical DVDs. They are strictly a streaming platform from whom you can obtain the video directly. However, with their permission we will begin the production of the physical DVDs for sale and mailing. That endeavor is imminent, I just have to forward a couple of graphics files to Webmeister Tim who will be doing the actual DVD burning and packaging. Good thing on that as at the moment I am out of the Wood Finishing video.
Another video undertaking is to finally wrap up the editing of the “Make A Gragg Chair” video (I now know why there is an Academy Award for movie editing), and to finally get some videos up on a Youtube page. I have several, from presentations I have made over the years, and hope to begin shooting some less formal shop videos once I get a handle on the whole process with the help of videographer Chris, who is so busy I may have to execute the filming and production process without him. I am also working on a set of full-scale drawings of the chair for sale on the site.
If you come to Handworks please stop by to visit. The booth will have lots of stuff.
Last Saturday we were in Columbia, Maryland, first for my presentation to the Howard County Woodworker’s Guild, where a rollicking good time was had by all. I’ve spoken there twice before, most recently on the sober, memorable day of the second Space Shuttle disaster in 2003(?). There was no memorable public disaster last Saturday, other than the ongoing collapse of Western Civilization.
I had a such a terrific time! I sometimes forget how much I enjoy teaching traditional wood finishing. The large-ish audience was very engaged and I had some difficulty getting things wrapped up and loaded afterwards as person after person came to ask questions as I was packing up.
For this 75-minute demo I selected the highlights from my 3-day workshop Historic Wood Finishing. They might invite me back to teach that event, and I am pretty sure Joshua Farnsworth will ask me to teach it at his school near Charlottesville this summer. Check their respective web sites to catch any updates for that.
After this we met with long-time dear friends K and N to tour the moss art studio where she works, and consuming a delightful meal with them. We bought several of the moss art works as we were both enamored with them.
(I know, I am really lousy at taking pictures with my phone.)
On Saturday morning I will be making a presentation to the Howard Co. (MD) woodworker’s club on the topic of shellac finishing. Somehow I’ve got to cram enough content from a three-day workshop into 75-minutes to make true believers out of them.
The only way I can think to do this is to “Julia Child” it, so for the past couple of weeks I’ve been spending a few minutes here and there creating in-step sample boards, allowing me to jump into each step for a couple minutes and start with raw plywood and end up with some highly polished surfaces.
I’m also taking the tack of using only (well, at least mostly) locally available supplies, including Bulls-Eye shellac, fine artist’s brushes, good rags from the thrift store, Woodcraft or a good hardware store, etc.
My compewder is working after a manner. But I am definitely in the market for a new one.
I’ve spent much of the past few weeks readying for tomorrow’s presentation at the SAPFM Mid-Year Annual Meeting in Fredericksburg VA. I’m now packing up everything and will hit the road shortly.
It’s all been about making sample boards based on the likely finishing resources available to colonial craftsmen, which by definition means it has been non-stop fun. The variety of finishes possible with a small menu of materials is astounding. Colophony, beeswax (shellac (of course), turpentine, whisky, naphtha, linseed oil, walnut oil, are all it takes for a party to break out.
How could anyone not love finishing?
One added benefit of the exercise is that I am getting re-enthused to knock out the book. It has been hanging over my head for far too long!
One of my initial design/aesthetic choices for the standing tool cabinet was to make the prominent detailing to be black, along with the entire interior. In the former case it was to set off the comparative blandness of the oak veneer, about which there will be exhaustive posting in coming weeks, and in the latter it would serve to set off the tools themselves. As to the ebonized stringing in between the parquetry I am not yet fully convinced — I may instead go with rosewood which will serve the primary purpose equally well, although it will not tie-in with the interior well without further design– but ebonized interior is already a fait accompli.
The ebonized stringing for the proof-of-concept parquetry exercise representing the outer skin began with a piece or two from the pile of 1/4″ tulip poplar I had on hand, itself a raw material for yet another proof-of-concept for some fauxrushi I am prototyping. Using water soluble shellac as my coloring medium, a/k/a India Ink, is a method I use frequently.
The big box store pieces of tulip poplar fit a flower pot tray perfectly, so I used the tray as the immersion bath for the board. After soaking it all night the surface was really black.
Even then when ripping the bards on the bandsaw it was apparent that the interiors were not well dyed, so I repeated the tray and India ink step again with the strips. The result was a pile of 1/4″ wide ebonized stringing strips. That might sound a tad wide to you but remember, the front presentation of the cabinet as 4-feet-by-3-feet.
As to the interior, I noted that the soaking of the plywood with India ink yielded a very desirable surface, black-ish but still retaining the character of wood, a result not really possible with something like gel stain or il paint.
For the home stretch of the jam-packed three-day workshop the final set of exercises involved the giant panel. It had already served its first purpose, getting the students comfortable with laying down an exquisite brushed shellac surface over a large area. Since the panels were roughly half the size of a dining table, I’m thinking any hurdles of intimidation have been overcome.
At this point the panel was subdivided into four quadrants, each of them to be treated in a unique manner. The first quarter was easy — just leave it alone as an example of laying down an excellent base of three-inning shellac.
A second quarter was spirit varnish pad polished to a high sheen, demonstrating the option of creating a not-grain-filled padded surface.
The third quarter was hand polished with abrasive powders, first 4F pumice then rottenstone in mineral oil, using a polishing pad identical to the spirit varnishing pad. This was followed by a light application of paste wax and buffed when the wax was firm.
The final quarter was burnished with Liberon 0000 steel wool saturated with paste wax, and as with the rottenstone polishing, rubbed until you just get tired. When the paste wax was firm ex poste it was buffed with flannel to a brilliant glow.
As always there is at least one somebody who gets seduced by my library.
When we wrapped up the event it was clear that they had all mastered the techniques wonderfully, and departed with confidence and a set of sample boards to guide and inspire them for decades to come.
If scheduling a workshop identical to the one these fellows completed, drop me a note. I will no longer “schedule” any workshops but only host them on request.
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