Beeswax, Linseed and Turps

[Aussiephil]

During the Friday prattle session last friday one of the topics was a general purpose finish for benches, tool handles and other general wood things that were not in contact with food.
https://www.woodworkforums.com/f303/friday-lunch-prattle-234530/11

Doug shared his recipe of 1 litre of Pure Gum Turps, 1 litre of boiled linseed oil and enough Beeswax to dissolve into the mixture as possible without actually melting it.

I wanted to try it but don't have any pure gum turpentine on hand and some of the data on it looks a little scary so I said i would try it with Mineral Turps as it is a recognised though not as good substitute for pure gum.
Couple of people commented that this was not ideal and it could be cloudy and patchy when applied.

So a little experiment is underway..... since my granulated beeswax turned up really fast.

first step was to dissolve some beeswax into mineral turps so i threw a couple handfuls into a bottle added around 300ml of min turps and left over night. This resulted in a quite yellow looking liquid with the remaining beeswax chips looking bleached.
Filter this through some lycra to remove larger solids and then mixed 50/50 with linseed.
about 36hrs later and a colder day that mix seems to have settled some of the beeswax out of solution

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in the horizontal photo you can see the slightly cloudy solution and in the vertical one the beeswax at the bottom.

Shake well and everything goes a little cloudy but well distributed.

At the time in mixed the above together i added 500ml of fresh mineral turps to the beeswax pellets already used to see if more would dissolve.
What somewhat surprised me is that what looked like very bleached pellets still yielded a lot of yellow colour.

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What's quite obvious though is the clear layer, the cloudy layer and the solid pellets still left, when this is shaken it goes very milky.

The cloudy part looks a bit like the paste type wax mixes you see online.

i'd like to decant the milky layer out to use with just the boiled linseed limiting the amount of mineral turps to see what it behaves like.

I have tried the 50/50 mix on some hardwood and it seemed to leave a smooth feeling behind.

Next time i'm in Bunnings i'll grab some pure gum turps to try out and see what it does.

[LanceC]

Phil, my experience is that 36 hours may be a little optimistic to fully dissolve the beeswax. Give it a bit more time to dissolve fully, making sure you periodically shake up the bottle.

I would be interested in your, and others' experience with how long the applied finish takes to harden. It may be the cool climate here, but find that it is still oily to the touch for up to a week after application.

[markharrison]

You can buy gum turpentine at Bunnings. Yeah, the MSDS is scary. I've had the one one litre bottle for nearly six years so I'm not worried about it.

It mainly gets used to soften up beeswax polish in my workshop when it gets a bit hard to put on.

[justonething]

I was curious, and I also wanted to have something that will dry. So I was experimenting with adding some polyurethane to the mix. The blent came from a recipe for Tru-oil and Doug's utility mix.

It consists of 100 ml of polyurethane;
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67 ml of pure tung oil;
140 ml of limonene; and finally
10 g of beeswax flake.
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Once they were mixed, they became a brew with wax suspending. (the dark specks are actually from the spoon I was using.
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I have a electric wax heater with a water bath. Before heating it up, the wax were still sitting at the bottom of the bath.
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After warming it up and let it stew for an hour or two, with the temperature kept at luke warm. The wax finally dissolved.
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I let it cool for about an hour. The solution has turned cloudy, resembling that of a hard wax oil.
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I think I'll let it stand for a bit before using it.
Anyhow, I think warming the utility mix will definitely help dissolving it.

[Aussiephil]

nice work Paul, you went a step further than i have in weighing the beeswax, i've just been trying to saturate the mineral turps.

We have had a typical early spring day here in Canberra with the temperature dropping to 6c around lunchtime and done to 3c now.... my 50/50 mix has become very cloudy indicating the beeswax in suspension is solidifying a little as the temperature drops.

despite the cloudiness it goes onto timber just fine and seems to provide and even coat whilst soaking in.

@Lance: the timber i have is very dry but even a heavy wet let it soak type coat dried in a few hours today so it seems the mix i have is fairly fast drying. realtively :)

Ps thanks for adding and contributing

Cheers
Phil

[justonething]

I let the brew stand over night.
This morning I put the mix in a Tomato sauce bottle.
I squeezed out the finish while rubbing it with a 1200 grit sandpaper.
After that I let it soak in while I cleaned up (10 ~ 15 mins)
At the end of the 10~15 mins. This is what I got
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You will notice that there is a smudge mark in the middle there.
When I tried to wipe off the excess and the smudge, It felt like it was already drying.
I have a feeling that it will dry within a couple of hours. Its quite cool in Melbourne today, so its defintely quite fast drying.
I'm not sure why. Could it be because:

I let it stand overnight, but the mix was still runny this morning;
I used Limenene instead of turps;
I used pure tung oil instead of boiled linseed oil;
I added polyurethane;

The surface also felt really waxy.

[Aussiephil]

Got a little bit more done in the shed fit out over the weekend and as i had the "table" saw out for some work thought i would make the draw fronts for the bench and finish them with some of the 50/50 mix

This is 5 fronts cut out from the hardwood flooring pile i have, ripped the groove off, then ripped to 93mm wide then dropped through the thicknesser to remove the grooves on the back, only the face in the photo has been sanded and i notice in the photo i missed a couple pencil marks

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Considering i'm using a basic ryobi contractor saw i'm pretty damn happy with how it cuts at the moment.

I then drowned them in some of the 50/50 mix about 6pm tonight.... it's already down to 5c outside so it will be interesting to see how they go overnight, i'm suspecting that they will be dryish tomorrow.

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What i want to do is round over the front edges but the router table is currently out of action and i don't have a small trim router as the old 1/4" router bit the dust a few years ago and i haven't replaced it.

I picked up some Gum Turpentine today at bunnings but have yet got a spare container to dissolve some beeswax into it....

[Aussiephil]

Phil, my experience is that 36 hours may be a little optimistic to fully dissolve the beeswax. Give it a bit more time to dissolve fully, making sure you periodically shake up the bottle.

I would be interested in your, and others' experience with how long the applied finish takes to harden. It may be the cool climate here, but find that it is still oily to the touch for up to a week after application

Todays data may change your thoughts on 36hrs.
Let me put the picture inline and speak to the picture.

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around lunchtime yesterday i specifically mixed the GumT and beeswax by weight so i had known starting point 50gm beeswax/500gm GumT (590ml)
The MinT bottle was drained of the existing mix and then just refilled over the top of the existing beeswas so it would have already been in a softening state.

Both bottles at a temp of 11.5c this morning were shaken to see how they were dissolving as there was clear layers.. didn't grab a photo... in both cases the mix turned creamy for want of a word and you can see the suspended beeswax particles.

This indicates at least to me that we have reached saturation level for the dissolved solids.

I haven't got a photo but i have just over a litre of beeswax/MinT in another bottle that was yesterday very liquid and when shaken this morning the mix also went creamy.

Temperature is a factor in this.

Gum T seems to work faster as a solvent.

As to your second question Lance: the boards i coated above are still oily and i wonder if the beeswax itself is limiting the uptake of the linseed oil.... i'll have to do a control board next time with sections. Linseed Oil - Beeswax/turps - 50/50 mix and then see if they absorb/dry differently.