As a fan of handmade shellac, I try to be ever mindful that someone’s career-path led to a place where they are standing in front of an open charcoal fire hearth “the “bhatta”) while handling molten shellac. This video presents a little different process than I was familiar with, but is compelling nonetheless.
This makes me thankful for the products these people make, and that I live in a different place and time. My Iowa/Minnesota blood practically curdles at the thought of working in this environment but I celebrate them for doing so. As the Hayekian framework posits, humans choose paths they perceive as beneficial compared to the alternatives. The same can probably be said for lacquerworkers given my extreme sensitivity to urushiol.
Day 3 of the Historic Woodfinishing workshop brings all the exercises to completion/fruition. Well, as many as we can get to. Even though the core syllabus has been set for a long time I continue to tinker at the edges, adding or subtracting projects to enhance the learning experience.
This included prepping and continuing spirit varnish pad polishing, often called “French polishing” although I am pretty sure it was originally an English technique.
One of the most fun aspects of the class was introducing the students to tar, the most common brown part of the “brown and shiny” construct. Diluted whit “white spirits” a/k/a naphtha/mineral spirits/turpentine the concoction is a great glaze of a rich brown color.
Finally came the time for rubbing out three of the quarters of the large [panel, including rubbing with Liberon 0000 steel wool infused with paste wax, rottenstone/tripoli abrasive in a white spirit slurry followed by paste wax, and a pumice polishing followed by spirit varnish pad polishing.
That about wraps it up.
BTW, here is a screen shot of my latest version of the syllabus, updated even since this workshop. So, if you attend an Introduction to Historic Woodfinishing workshop this will be the regimen.
Day 2 began with scraping the large panels with razor blades to get them really smooth, followed by a final “inning” of 5 or 6 coats of shellac varnish, giving a total application of about 15 coats. These were then set aside for final rub-out at the conclusion of Day 3.
We then moved on to brushing a few coats of varnish on turnings and embossed moldings to introduce the notion of using an oval tip brush on undulating surfaces. The right tool makes all the difference.
Smaller panels were varnished in preparation for further exercises; the plywood panel was for water/wax polishing (we never got to that one since we ran out of time) and the mahogany panel was for spirit varnish pad polishing.
The final event of the day was applying, scraping, and buffing a molten beeswax foundation to these solid cherry panels in preparation for subsequent pad polishing. Prior to the advent of plaster-like grain fillers in the late 19th century, beeswax was the grain filler for almost all glossy finishes.
It might not sound like much but these activities did fill the whole day.
My friend, planemaker Steve Voigt, has joined me in the rabbit hole of historic varnishes. His latest adventure is about making copal varnish, and you can follow it at his blog.
I recently had the great opportunity to teach my 3-day Introduction to Historic Woodfinishing workshop at Joshua Farnsworth’s Wood and Shop school. I have probably taught this class twenty or thirty times, having settled on a base syllabus long ago but continuing to tweak it a smidge every so often. I’ll post it in one of the upcoming blogs once I can figure out how to make a screen capture image.
The first day is mostly consumed with my (in?)famous exercise of finishing a 24″ x 48″ piece of birch plywood with a 1-inch brush, beginning the day’s activities with five or six coats of 1-1/2 lb shellac. (sorry, I forgot to take pics of this step)
This is followed in short order with exercises in using pumice blocks to “sand” the surfaces, polissoirs to burnish the surface, and a generous application of molten beeswax.
Late in the afternoon the big panels are sanded lightly to remove any fuzz or debris, followed by another five or six coats of the same shellac.
The day was completed with some wax scraping, partly in preparation for processes yet to come.
We were recently blessed with another visit from our dear friends, Mr. & Mrs. Ripplin’John. They spent several days with us at the cabin and in the barn, and one of the days we took a day trip to Richmond to tour the Virginia Museum of Fine Art, a mid-sized treasure in the museum firmament. John is working his way through an MFA with an emphasis on decorative metal-and-wood objects, and the VMFA has a simply fantastic collection of Faberge along with a wonderful collection of 20th Century furniture.
These two remarkable pieces were only two of many hundreds from the Faberge and related decorative metal objects. My fascination with the collection and the ambient light levels discouraged me from taking many pictures in these galleries.
There were several captivating vignettes/galleries of Art Nouveau furniture, including this eye popping but hopelessly impractical chair by Carlo Bugatti, uncle of the car designer.
Just around the corner from that chair was this bedroom suite (I cannot remember at this moment whether it was from Galle or Marjorelle),
and this “office” or parlor set by an artist whose name does not come to mind at the moment. In fact the entire collection is an expertly assembled compilation of all the familiar names, but as I sit here I cannot instantly recall all of them.
Out in the hallway were these spectacular objects, including a bust by the incomparable Alphonse Mucha and the figurine lamp that is so vibrant you can almost sense the wind billowing the fabric around the model, a la Cyd Charisse in Singing in the Rain.
On the other side of the hallway were many more galleries with equally spectacular furniture and accessories.
This Ruhlmann cabinet is every bit breathtaking as you would expect.
One of the pieces evoked a bittersweet memory. Several years ago Mrs. Barn and I were at an outdoor auction and I saw one of these Stickley box chairs from across the parking lot, and I took off like a bird dog. My first thought was, “I hope I’m the only person who knows what this is.” (The chair was in literally “as new” condition, and I say that like almost never, as though someone bought it a hundred years ago and then put it in the closet ever since. I mean it was in perfect, original condition. *Every part* of it, except for the feet which were sitting in a mud puddle at the time.) My second thought was, “Given that this is a ‘cash only’ auction, how much money did we bring?” In the end the second consideration was moot (~$1500) as the sale price was close to $8000, which answers the first question.
As a total Mackintosh fan-boy I absolutely loved this ensemble of a fireplace surround, a diminutive shelf clock, and several of his chairs. This chair was my favorite.
A grand day for sure, and I can recommend the museum especially for its furniture collections. Plus, there is no admission fee!
At last week’s Introduction to Historic Woodfinishing my “I Roll With Roubo” shirt got some admiring comments, so I thought I would post it again here. You can get your own at CafePress.com.
My first Roubo shirt was a gift from the designer Jonathan Szczepanski, I like it so much I bought two more. I have no other connection to the enterprise.
Given my possession of a full case (~3 gallons) of 151 proof grain alcohol, useless for much of anything but cleaning brushes, I decided to try to salvage it if possible.
Mixing some varnish with pure 151 was the obvious place to start. I mixed up a pint of the shellac lemon resin as normal for a 190 mix, then let it sit for several days to see if it would go into solution.
It did not.
I next added some 190 to the pseudosolution, estimating that a proportional addition would result in a roughly proportional increase in the proof/solubility parameter. By that metric I was able to achieve complete solvation around the 170 proof level. A couple days at that level and I had a container of shellac varnish.
I brushed it onto a sample panel with vaguely successful results. The first application, in particular, had simply horrible brush-feel, and the result was not promising.
But, with stubborn determination I applied another half dozen coats in a two hour period, and two days later it had fused into something resembling a finish. It would not have been an acceptable surface for a typical finishing project, but I charged ahead to see what, if anything, could be resultant from taking the exercise to completion.
With the brushed out surface cured for a few days, I scraped it over half of the panel surface, then detailed it with my “go to” step of rubbing it with Liberon 0000 steel wool and paste wax, then buffing the surface after a couple hours.
The end result was not awful. It doesn’t mean that I’ll be using much 151 proof grain alcohol in varnish making, but its’s good to know that I could use it if I really needed to.
With my final teaching for the year now completed (more about that in a coming post) and the yardwork slowly tapering off, I am very much looking forward to returning to the shop pretty much full-time in the near future.
One of the targeted activities is prepping for Handworks in Amana, Iowa, over the Labor Day weekend. If you have any interest in handtool woodworking, you would find it sorta like a cross between Woodstock and a San Fransisco open air drug market, but for tools.
Weighing and packaging 2-lb bags of #1 Lemon shellac flour. Ask me the story about this some time.
A tub o’ “gold dust.”
Yesterday while putting away my supplies and workpieces from the Introduction to Historic Woodworking workshop I soon pivoted to packaging up a quantity of my #1 Lemon Shellac flour for resale there. I’d had a bag on the bench to get some packaged for the workshop, and it was easier just to repackage the rest rather than haul it back downstairs. I will ask Mrs. Barn to do her thing with melting and casting the beeswax bars, I’ll make another several batches of shellac wax and my Blend 31 bars, my polissoir-maker is working diligently to get me enough inventory for Amana…
For the past three weeks I’ve been spending all my available shop time preparing for next week’s Introduction to Historic Woodfinishing workshop over the mountains at Joshua Farnsworth’s Wood and Shop school. If you have ever traveled to teach a workshop you know how involved it can be to assemble and pack all the requisite supplies and syllabus exercises for each student, all the more complicated since you won’t be “at home” and could go into the next room for anything you forgot to have set out.
Workpieces for a dozen exercises, brushes, resins, waxes, polissoirs, solvents, abrasives, scrapers, rags of a dozen different types, cases of jars, etc,, etc., etc. I have not counted them precisely but at this point I would guess I am closing in on 20 bins of materials. Were I so inclined I could create a giant artistic collage in the driveway and crank up Set The Controls For The Heart of The Sun. Unless you are of a certain vintage that last reference is probably just gibberish.
While I have made headway in my battles to find acceptable and affordable plywood to use as exercise workpieces, not great but better (good plywood for class exercises would raise the per-pupil materials cost to well over $200 instead of the ~$75 it is now) so instead this time I grabbed some pieces of mahogany and cherry from my stashes of “pieces too small to really make stuff from” and resawed and planed them so each student could have at least some of each. Pad polishing on inferior plywood just doesn’t cut it.
Tomorrow after church I will load my pickup to the gunwales and head back into civilization to set up, then begin teaching at 9AM Monday.
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