Where did I go?

First of all, even saying that, I feel like responding to myself “nobody asked”. Which is true! But I haven’t posted for a while and there are plenty of things I’d like to post here.

So, it’s not as if I haven’t made anything or done anything, and nothing bad has happened, just tied up for spring and making and doing things that aren’t really notable in the sense that I don’t want to become yet another blogger who “has a really great idea to share!!!!!” because they learned something a week ago and compared it to little.

But what I’ve been doing that I’m not that great it and that’s been absorbing time is basically three things:

• Experimenting with baking japanning – the real stuff, not paint or tinted boat varnish. Turns out, we’ve all been cheated if we have read that it’s difficult or expensive – by people giving bad advice. The true baked japanning is easy and it’s fantastic.
• Trying my hand at making rasps. Not as something to make a lot of, but just got a flying burr one day (my mother would say “something flew up your rear and now you’re up and around”) thinking wait…with all of this heat treat knowledge and belt grinding equipment, i should be able to figure out not only how to make a rasp blank and stitch it, but I should be able to make a very good graver or stitching tool to stitch one. And the latter is true. I’m on the fence about whether or not I’ll want to make this sort of a relaxing activity because it’s easy to stitch a rasp to some extent, but a little less easy to do several teeth per second neatly on a rounded blank.
• And lastly – getting back to cooking varnish. Natural resin varnishes are superb. they are a much more durable and flexible version of shellac with a lot of variety. Steve Voigt is nipples deep in varnish experimenting for at least a year now, and he also skipped a burr across the state, even though he may never have intended to throw one, and that one flew up my rear and as of yesterday, I cooked varnish for the second time. And it came out not as good as I’d like, which is the best way for me personally to get motivated.

The Japanning

On the japanning – this sprung out of varnish. Japanning is basically a varnish (resin, oil, solvent) and the high quality stuff gets baked, which means the baking can actually do the varnish cooking and catalyze the reaction to dry all at once. If you’ve seen a black singer sewing machine, or stanley tools, same stuff. The recipe is a combination of gilsonite (natural very clean and high melting temp/good hardness asphaltum), linseed oil and turpentine. Asphaltum gets dissolved into the turpentine and then linseed oil added later. OR, it can be cooked into a varnish – I’ll not go into that further at this point but to say it appears that avoiding the parts that separate when mixed cold is attainable just by cooking the resin and oil together and making a varnish. You can search that further if you’d like – gilsonite powder makes this an easy task, but nothing related to making varnish should ever go on indoors – it is outdoor only and can be so stinky that you may want to wear a mask at the same time.

My attempts with cold mix are here, and I’m about to put the cooked version on a stanley scraper. This is so easy to do reasonably well that it’s almost sinful.

The cold mix is baked at 400-450F. Above that, it will smoke and potentially run, and below that, the oil and gilsonite asphaltum may not link, leaving you with a finish that isn’t durable and may separate over time.

Don’t substitute petroleum bitumen or roofing pitch or any of that. Those are softer resins and they are loaded with sulfur, so you’d get a soft result and a very very stinky house and probably a good dose of hydrogen sulfide if cooked in an enclosed area. No good.

The shaves above don’t look like anything special except they’re no longer missing japanning, but they feel divine and there is a durability to japanning that nothing else will touch.

There are so many ways advocated online to avoid making the cold mix and baking it that it really irritated me once I looked at this through the lens of a varnish. They often involve adding some colorant to expensive and very stinky marine varnish. it makes no sense to me other than that it’s just one more example of how we get enthusiastic or egotistical people in the woodworking community who want to be the source of information more than they want to provide accurate information.

The Rasps

There’s not a whole lot to say about the rasps. It’s not hard to make “a rasp”, but to make these, make the graver, and be able to heat treat them without destroying the teeth or having a warped blank is not that accessible, so I won’t go on about what it takes. It’s a personal experiment of mine, just something to add as an idle hands solution as it’s kind of relaxing and interesting enough to hold your attention if you can do it.

I don’t know that there’s much to read about making rasps. First is on the right, second on the left and third in the middle. They’re each a bit different but it’s safe to say I was still figuring out how to shape the gravers and what angle to hold them and how to not misstrike them and break the beak off on the curved side. A zillion tiny teeth sort of settled it at once. They’re hardened, and they work. And not reading a ton about it allows for finding what’s not so great.

The rasp on the right does have the tip bent upward to make handles – I wanted something more coarse than the gramercy version. it’s coarse. And I saw not long after that gramercy now sells a coarse version, too.

The one on the left with tiny teeth is great in hard woods, but they’re so close together that you have to stop once in a while and brush the junk out. The one in the middle is literally just a two sided coarse rasp for hogging. I’ll spare you my thoughts on the whole blogosphere telling people they should have a whole bunch of rasps aside from saying you shouldn’t have many if money is an issue and there are a whole lot of files that do the same thing as fine tooth rasps. Another irk, that this or that blogger who wants to be the source of information or who works for magazines and feels that it’s more important to convince you to buy tools than it is to give you good information – well, you know. “You have to have these, and a whole bunch of them”. you don’t. I’ll bet there are a lot of French rasps sitting around idle because some Pop Wood article or blog said people should unload $800 on them.

I think I’m mostly through this short experimentation phase…I left the varnish out of the discussion here. Maybe more on it another time. I think it’s worth doing if you’re interested, but it doesn’t need to be added here.