18th Century Beeswax Wood Finishing with a French Polissoir (Don Williams Workshop Tour Part 4)

[Music] I think we'll finish up today with finishing which is as it should be this is a palisa it's a it's a tool that was used traditionally for preparing and applying finishes particularly wax finishes it is not specific to Europe uh this particular style of one is French uh I discovered it while working on the on the rubo book but this is you know straight from the broom maker so the end of it is a little bit rough and it's not uh perfectly smooth and plar or even um conical so first thing I have to do is is sand it and create sort of a smooth Crown to it um and I'm just rotating this and then starting at the edge and then working to the center until I can create a little bit of a crown and once I get this thing so that it's got a nice smooth crowned profile on the on the top it's it's ready to ready to use and uh let's take a look and see so you can see that it's really getting much smoother and even in in its uh configuration and uh just a little bit of a crown not much the less you can get by with the better so I'm just going to rotate this around once more all the way and then it'll be ready to go and uh if if you have one of these tools and I sell these tools this one is sold only through Lee neelon this one I sell on my website um and some other uh versions of this uh at donb bar.com you can feel free to contact me about that um and I'll be happy to talk with you about them but uh I've been a finisher professionally since about 1972 or three and I'm finding that this tool is really even at this point just changing the way I work um it's really quite quite spectacular and uh I can set this aside and and I'm just going to take the backside of this board which is just a piece of plywood I've done nothing to it and I'm just going to rub it with this um polisher and you can see it's going to begin to change the character and the gloss of that surface um I'm not sure if it's showing up in the camera but I'll move it until until it can but it just compresses and polishes the fibers of of the wood uh so you can you can probably see some some change in gloss right at that corner so anyway that's just the sort of work that this tool does and then when you use it in concert with uh some paste wax and this is a blend that I've come up with and hope to mark it sort of soon it's a beeswax sh back wax blend and I'm just going to you know work it on the surface normally I would first um submerge this polisher in molten wax to have it fully saturated but I didn't just cuz we just thought about doing this today so um so this is this is both polishing and finishing the surface and this would have been the finish that was that was used back in the day a lot um the high both High style and country style furniture were often finished with with wax it was the prim primary finish in transparent finishes back in back in the day and it has the advantage also filling the grain while you're working so um so that's pretty pretty nifty and we'll just set that aside and then buff it out with a a pad the I I use these lintree lithography pads from the web roll company I think they're the only ones still making them but uh you know back in the day that would be the finish that would be done and uh you could if if we the long we wait on this the higher the the shine is going to buff uh because I didn't I didn't really work this into the plan very well but that's just the way finishing a lot of finishing would have been done so I'm still perfecting my formulation of that paste wax but it does uh it does yield a very pleasing surface both to the to the eye and the hand so but another finish that I wanted to mention was some uh uh a lotion polish an archival quality lotion polish that we invented at the Smithsonian that we patented that was patented it wasn't me that patented my colleague Mel lovak and I worked on this and he patented and this is a very very high performance um maintenance it can either be a maintenance surface you know a furniture polish or it can be a finish all by itself and it again is a blend of shellac wax and Beeswax and I'm hoping to go into production on this sometime later this year and I'm just spreading it around you know doesn't need much of a layer at all just a pretty thin layer and uh I'll just wipe off a little you don't want you don't want so much of it that you have to wipe it off but I put a little too much on so I'm just going to wipe some off and you can just wait a couple minutes and then buff it to pretty much a mirror shine as you can you can see I'm hoping you can see some of that gloss in the camera and again after it sits for a little bit but this project a product was invented purposefully for um archival Quality Furniture care within a within a collectible or museum a museum environment and yet it's still an exceedingly high performance um product and uh was used in the US House and I think on the Senate and other places and certainly at the Smithson we used it but it's something that I'll be manufacturing here in the near future for sale and you know if you check back on my website which is donb bar.com you can get an update on it or I think if you go to Joshua's website wooden woodshop.com is that right yeah and I'm sure he'll he'll keep up with it but uh again this is just this is not a surface that's been well prepared it's just something we dreamed up to do here just before we went on camera so um the surface is really really smooth and slick and you can see you can see the the sheen of it at least I hope you can so but that's that's an that's the next big chapter in our undertaking here is uh man manufacturing mels wax named after uh my colleague and dear friend Mel hovak who died a few years ago and we're carrying on in his name and in his honor to to bring this to you so with that I think we're going to wind up the tour of my my shop and my space and my my fairly idyllic life out here in the mountains and uh I hope you get to pursue the same dreams that I've been able to accomplish uh or at least reach for and uh hope you have as much fun doing it as I did and thanks for coming for a visit and I look forward to hearing from you and staying in touch if you're interested in learning traditional woodworking with hand tools visit my website at woodand shop.com where you can find free video tutorials buying guides and reviews make sure you subscribe to my regular blog posts and also check out my 10 steps for getting started enjoy [Music]

Channel: Wood and Shop

Views: 36,729

Keywords: woodwork, woodworking, traditional woodworking, roy underhill, woodwright's shop, chris schwarz, lie-nielsen, hand planes, hand saws, chisels, don williams, wood finishing, beeswax

Id: AtUN8obqB-A

Length: 10min 13sec (613 seconds)

Published: Mon May 22 2017