In Praise of Pack-rat-ery

50 years ago my paste wax of choice for almost any paste wax-ey purpose was Behlen’s Blue Label Paste Wax, which for an obvious reason I remember it as “Blue Diamond” paste wax.  Regardless, it was a superb product, easy to use and very high performance.

Sometime in the 90s I couldn’t find it any longer and embarked on a quest to find a new go-to wax.  There were, and still are, lots of excellent paste waxes on the market (including, apparently, Blue Label; this image was pulled off the interwebz), and also a lot that I would not choose because they were either hard to use, or had potentially deleterious ingredients for use on fragile antique surfaces, or their formulations could either not be ascertained or changed from something better to something not better.  NB – this was among the many motivations behind the development of Mel’s Wax.

I ended up with Johnson’s regular yellow-and-red label as the one to use for everything I would have used Blue Diamond for.  But a couple years ago this became hard to find and I discovered that it had been discontinued for, to me, inexplicable reasons.  Try as I might I could obtain no new cans for a reasonable price, or even a slightly unreasonable price even on Ebay.

Fortunately, I had a bit of it here, a bit of it there, in short I had a can at or near every single workstation I occupy, in the barn or elsewhere.  I compiled it all in one place and it turned out that I had a dozen mostly-full tins.

I guess I am more set for it than I first assumed.

All because I have pack rat inclinations, I guess.