Comparison of finishes for turners

[rsser]

The current issue of Aust Wood Review has a comparative test of 18 finishes.

This is a shameless plug as I did the tests and wrote them up.

It was a bleeding marathon.

Declaration: the article was paid for but there's no bonus to the writer of extra sales!

[Scott]

Congrats on getting published, great article. How heavily edited was the article and would you have liked to have anything extra appearing in the article to support your conclusion?

[rsser]

Thanks Scott.

The article wasn't edited except by me, following some of the suggestions Linda made on a draft regarding clarity and presentation.

The decision to make it a comparative test, holding methods of application constant by and large, ruled out the tweaks that regular users of a product develop to get the result they want. In other words, the procedure meant that the best possible result with each finish (however that's defined) wasn't necessarily produced. A case in point is hard burnishing that some turners employ with oil finishes; that can work to fill the grain and lift the sheen. You might opt to do that with an open pored timber like Jarrah but not on a dense desert timber.

[Christos]

I have not been able to read the full article yet so might be a bit premature in asking this question.

Why is smell a consideration?

[Scott]

Why is smell a consideration?

I would dare say that before I used something like Nitrocellulose Lacquer for the first time, the smell and toxicity wouldn't leave me feeling like a space cadet.

[rsser]

Yeah. Smell is part of the larger matter of ease of use and whether you can readily live with a product.

Some of the products were nice to work with at the level of smell and could be used all day long. Some like NC sealer/lacquer that Scott mentions aren't.

Of course we only had two testers of this and YMMV.

[Christos]

Thanks for the reply.

[rsser]

I drew up a list of possible qualities to test and/or report on when starting in on this project.

One of them was 'green' credentials. Eg. toxicity when 'wet' and food safety when dry/cured.

Some makers imply that their product is 'organic' but I learned from one maker that anything with carbon in it can be called organic.

When looking into it further it became clear that the expertise of an industrial chemist was needed.

Some chemicals go under different names. It wasn't possible to get makers to declare all the ingredients in their product as that was giving away trade secrets. And OHS authorities in different jurisdictions in any case vary in their assessments of toxicity.

Another matter I didn't report on was the quality of instructions provided or available. Constantia and uBeaut are stand-outs in this respect.

...

Just as an aside, I mention in the article tests that were reported on the forum on the water/alcohol resistance immediately produced with hard burnishing. Those were done by LGS on flat surfaces and I would like to acknowledge my debt to him.

As I would my debt to the editor, Linda Nathan. When the story was going to be about comparative differences on a set of test criteria and the outcome was pretty much 'no significant difference' an editor of a scientific journal wouldn't publish it.

[jimbur]

I haven't got the article in front of me Ern (my son nicked it) so I'm going on a fallible memory. I think you had a little trouble at one point with blackwood. It made me feel better as I'd had the same thing using a second-hand piece where polyurethane took forever to harden. At the time I put it down to a previous finish.
I wonder if the advertisers using the term "organic" are keeping themselves in the clear legally by sticking to one definition while aiming at buyers reading it as implying another. What's the next thing? Perhaps containing the miracle organic ingredient HCN for that perfect dead finish.

[rsser]

A HCN finish eh? The gift that with the right person keeps on giving

Yeah, two finishes were very slow drying on Blackwood despite substantial stretches of low relative humidity and temps around 22º.