Donsbarn.com Store Update

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.