Friction Polish Exposé! Secrets Revealed!

hi I'm the Rick and Rick turns and today I'm going to talk about friction polish everything you never wanted to know and a lot more besides I want to talk about what friction polish is how you mix it up and how you use it before I start into a lot of detail I'm gonna just give you a quick run through a summary of what I'll be saying today first of all friction polish very simple and easy way of getting a high shine on woodturning piece while it's still on the light the polish is applied directly with a rag to the running object the basic formula for friction polish is one part shellac one part alcohol and one part oil linseed oil it's just that simple you can put on one coat you can put on multiple coats friction polish is normally made with shellac but there are people who have a friction polish that is based on lacquer friction polish is food safe now there's a lot of discussion about this on the internet you can certainly find lots of opinions on it but everything I've read pretty much ends up saying yeah it's food safe I'll go into that more later friction polish is based on shellac it's susceptible to staining from water if the water sits on it for a while so don't use it on your diving mask it can also be marred by alcohol so don't use it on your drinking table it is not as durable as varnishes and lacquers are however it gives a great finish for something that's not going to be handled a huge amount a weed pot or Christmas ornament or something like that it's a terrific finish because it's really quick and really easy and actually not very expensive if you mix it yourself and we have two bottles of friction polish right here this one I think you can see the difference in color from here and down here well this is basically it's been sitting for a while it's separated already the shellac mixed out here the oil mix up here this one has been shaken up just before I started the camera so this is the way it should look when you decide to use it the first ingredient of friction polish that I want to talk about this shellac shellac actually has a lot of depth to it I found out a lot of stuff I didn't know about shellac when I was researching for this video the the earliest written evidence for shellac being used takes it back to about 3000 years ago however it does not have a shelf life that long shellac is used in a coating for candies and as a food glaze as a wood finish as we know standing sealer varnish it used to be used as electrical insulation on the wiring for motors it's been used to coat gramophone records it's used as a protective coating on paintings that is art type paintings it's used in cosmetics and it's also used as a stiffener for hats it's a very versatile liquid shellac is also used in French polishing if you're not into woodworking just woodturning you may not have heard of French polishing French polishing is a fairly labor-intensive method of getting an extremely good finish on a flat surface and it uses polish it uses shellac and it uses some type of very very fine abrasive and it involves rubbing for a long time but for what I'm told and what I've read you get a great finish with it now celac is both non-toxic and fda-approved and that is the FDA gives it a rating or whatever a GRA s which means generally recognized as safe and that means after curing don't drink it out of the can you can get a number of varieties of shellac depending on where it came from and those arrangements colors from light blonde all the way down to a dark brown shellac is 100% natural you probably already know this if you've been in the wood turning or wood working for a while shellac is produced by the lac bug it's a creation of the female Lac bug on certain trees in northern India and parts of Thailand it is produced as dry flakes or as buttons as just like it sounds like it's it's a little round disc mostly I've seen it for sale as either flakes or the liquid which is easier to use the flakes or the buttons are mixed with alcohol to make the liquid product like this now there's a couple of other varieties of shellac and that's waxed versus non waxed along with the lac secretions there is some wax naturally produced it's about three to five percent wax by Nature now you can buy select flakes or shellac liquid either waxed or unwaxed the big distinction is whether it has wax or not no the big reason you might want to know is if your top coating a waxed shellac it is conceivable you could have a problem with adhering other types of finish on it now I've read a lot of posts on the web looking for a definite answer to that what I've seen is both ways a lot of people say hey I use more nishes and lacquers right on top of shellac waxed shellac and I've never had any problem but then other people's caution against it so if you have any concerns about it you might want to get a D wipes breath now if you go to the store Home Depot or wherever and you buy scissors bull's-eyes shellac what you're going to get here is a waxed shellac now I email censors and ask him this specifically to make sure I knew what was going on because guess what it's not showing on the camera that's okay they produce a product called seal coat as a sealer as you might expect from the name and it is d west so if you really want to go the D wax route you want to buy the the seal coat from zen tzer's now interestingly enough I have not found another producer of shellac liquid shellac I'm not sure if sensors is the only one and incidentally they're a subsidiary rust-oleum but when I look to purchase a shellac in a liquid form I couldn't find anything other than Xin xor's for sale now liquid shellac is measured the dilution or the concentration is measured by what they call pound cut and I'm sure you've run across this before pal cut refers to the number of pounds of shellac flakes or shellac buttons that are dissolved into a gallon of alcohol so if you get if you buy something like scissors here bullseye shellac waxed that this is three pound cut it also doesn't say that on the can but you can find out by going to the manufacturers website and the three pound cut means they took three pounds of shellac dry shellac and they mixed it in with a gallon of alcohol before they put it in this camera if you're going to dilute shellac as as we're going to do for a friction polish unless you want to use it straight from the can with the three pound cut that would work but if you want to dilute it say you're going to go one two one like I mix up my friction polish with and as captain Eddie has suggested if you want to go one to one from this liquid you put in a cup of the shellac and you put in a cup of alcohol and what you now have is a one and a half pound cut so when you're looking for a select to start with a friction polish you may want to know what the panel cut is when I was looking online and Zins there's products what I felt was that almost all she'll actually read it a three pound cut or a four pound cut Zinser is right here you can get this in a gallon form in a gallon quantity as a four pound cut as far as I can see the quart size was only available as a three pound cut now these shellac product right here has more than just so like in it not much but a little bit because it's been made with denatured alcohol I think if you look on the back of the camera right in here you're gonna see the ingredients and the ingredients are ethanol isopropanol methyl isobutyl ketone haha pure CELAC and water water unfortunately the can here doesn't show the percentage of these ingredients if you go to their website you can get more detail on it and this is mostly shellac if you really want to know more about it find the material safety data sheet from the manufacturer and they're easy to find on google i found them for all kinds of things and shellac and boiled linseed oil and denatured alcohol and everything the MSDS it's basically talking about safety most of the sheets that I looked at also said what was in it some of them didn't go into a great deal of detail some of them would say hey it's 90% shellac it's 10% ethanol all kinds of stuff and then 2.5% of methyl ethyl ketone or whatever so if you're really concerned about what's there whether the product is safe to drink out of the can go to the MSDS and take a look at it shellac is flammable don't use it around an open fire or if you've got a torch going in the shop and of course as I mentioned earlier I think don't drink it the shellac itself when dry is edible but when it's been mixed up into a liquid like this this got denatured alcohol in it and denatured alcohol poisonous the next important component of friction polish is a dilution liquid for shellac and for that we want to use denatured alcohol now why is it denatured it's not the same thing as naturalization or you're an emigrant denatured alcohol is ethanol which is the stuff you can buy to get drunk that has had poisons added to it so that it's not really a good idea to drink this stuff denatured alcohol is also called methylated spirits the reason for that is because it's generally usually one of the poisons added to is methanol which is wood alcohol which is poisonous and will cause blindness and death if you drink enough of it now ethanol as I said you can get it drinkable from the liquor store okay so why do they put poison and denatured alcohol well really it's to keep the drunks from bobbing the hardware stores no but it is something like that if if the manufacturers were to produce it as ethanol yeah you can drink it but then it would be subject to send taxes from every local government all over the place and the price would go up well substantially so it has methanol added to it and frequently there's a couple of other poisonous ingredients added to it methanol is also known as methyl alcohol and the denatured alcohol that is made with methanol is frequently called methylated spirits I think in the UK and maybe other parts of the world in the US would generally see it as denatured alcohol there's another type of alcohol you can get go up to your drugstore and you can buy this rubbing alcohol it's it's got various names this will help it happens to be labeled alcohol and it's isopropyl isopropyl alcohol and it is furthermore a 91% isopropyl alcohol this is not really suitable for friction polish what you really want is denatured alcohol the reason is this generally has some other additive it is still an alcohol just like ethanol it's in the same chemical family so it'll work but when I used it I didn't get the best results with it and possibly the reason is it's been diluted with other liquids this container doesn't say a lot about that but it does say on the back an active ingredient water you don't really want water in there not agree for your CELAC mix so I don't know if that's what caused the afore when I used this but I went back to denatured alcohol pretty quick well the front this one says 91% isopropyl the back it says water's been added so I would guess 9% water your best bet is denatured alcohol just like it says when the camp recommendations I have read for this is use 95 percent alcohol if you buy this can it does not say anywhere on it exactly what the dilution czar I also read that if you just go to when you rig bucks stores of the hardware store and you grab a can of denatured alcohol it may not be even ninety percent alcohol it could be as low as 50 to 60 percent alcohol so take a look at the can maybe there'll be some information on it that says the percentage of alcohol ethanol and the can you want is higher percentage of ethanol as you can get now let me say it one more time denatured alcohol is poisonous don't drink it liquid form friction polish has denatured alcohol is poisonous don't drink it either and don't use it as salad dressing taste terrible denatured alcohol is it's also quite flammable so don't use it around the campfire the third and last major ingredient of a friction polish is oil in seed oil most of all and oil in seed oil are made from flax seed flax seed is a natural product you can eat flax seed you can buy it as edible and you can buy linseed oil that is made for food consumption it hasn't been modified in any way and you could eat that boy linseed oil is a little bit different now the boy linseed oil is used in a lot of products it's used in varnish and oil paints it's used in putty it's used in linoleum it's used as a sizing and oil gilding as the flaxseed oil which is not exactly boiled linseed oil it's used as a nutritional supplement and it's used as a preservative on wood and on concrete it's also used in soaps and it's used in ink so boy linseed oil is used all over the place linseed oil particularly boiled linseed oil is known as a drying finish means that the the liquid will polymerize into a hard surface and medieval times and possibly at the yearly medieval festival linseed oil was actually boiled I mean really and truly boiled with wet oxide to give a product that was referred to that as well linseed oil and it was used in similar ways that we use it today obviously let oxide not a great thing eventually they figured that out tonight boil in seed oil refers to a combination of raw linseed oil stand oil which is produced by heating linseed oil up to about 300 degrees centigrade in the absence of air and some metallic dryers which hasten drying now I've looked at a lot of MSDS information on boiled linseed oil some of them just say well it's 100% oil in see oil some of them are very specific and they'll say it's it's 90% 99% boiled linseed oil a tenth of a percent of this particular type of metallic drier and two-tenths of a percent of some other type of metallic drier this can of oil linseed oil when I look at it as with the denatured alcohol can it this doesn't really tell me what's in it it does tell me you know first aid if you drink it or something like that if you really want to know what's exactly in your boil linseed oil look up the manufacturers safety data sheet on that the MSDS hopefully will have that information if it doesn't it will have information on treatment if you decide to drink it or get it on your hands or whatever I went through a lot of these looking at boiled linseed oil trying to figure out Z is it they're really safe to use you know it's got those metallic drivers in it as a liquid it's not safe to drink but on the other hand that's not instantly fatal leader most of the MSDS that I looked at they said you know if ingested don't don't try to cause vomiting because of the danger of aspiration of it into the lungs but they said you know the side effects gastrointestinal upset etc didn't say death or anything like that so by itself in the liquid form it's not deadly now there is a another type of boiled linseed oil that is hard to find and that is true well and that is polymerized boiled linseed oil or just pulverized linseed oil and in that case the drying properties have been affected or have been produced by actually boiling it or polymerizing it and no chemical additives have been added so it really is pure linseed oil at that point it's not raw if you use raw linseed oil your stuff will never dry but it is boiled linseed oil and will act just like boiled linseed oil but it doesn't have any metallic dryers and has been naturally treated to achieve drying properties that we want to see in boil linseed oil it's hard to find though I went looking for him I could only find one product being sold that I could positively identify was polymerized linseed oil and did not have any additives and that is a tried-and-true brand of danish oil which is 100% boiled linseed oil not sure why they call it danish maybe the Danish like to put that on their salad or something who knows I looked up a number of the manufacturers safety data sheets on boiled linseed oil products all kinds of them from all kinds of manufacturers maybe six or eight at least I looked up and they'll say something like no hazardous ingredients by osha definition or not hazardous under the Department of Labor definitions so what's going to cost to use friction polish you can either mix it yourself or you can buy commercial product I found a lot of variation in the commercial products cello wax I found selling at around thirty to thirty three dollars for eight ounces compare that to Milam friction polish and Hut crystal coat which are both in the neighborhood of fourteen dollars for eight ounces now if we mix it ourselves we've got shellac here and I found prices on that say from a low of about eleven dollars up to about fifteen dollars per quart denatured alcohol seven to eight dollars a quart well linseed oil as low as seven as high as sixteen dollars a quart so let's assume we are really good shoppers and we buy the minimum cost products and we've got eleven dollars here seven dollars here seven dollars here that comes up to a total of twenty-five dollars so that gives you three quarts of finish for twenty-five dollars and that comes down to about eight dollars per quart now of course got 32 ounces so let's reduce that to the size of the finishes the commercial finishes I talked about eight ounces and so that comes out to about two dollars for 8 ounces of homemade friction polish so we've got $2 for 8 ounces of homemade $33 for 8 ounces of shellow wax $14 for 8 ounces of my Luck's friction polish and $14 for our around 6 ounces of hot crystal code so two dollars versus 33 or 14 seems like a pretty good cultural ratio there to say make your own friction polish it is possible that the manufacturers know more than I do hopefully that's true and that they've got a product that's really superior to what you can mix I couldn't really say too that I use cello wax many years ago it was great but after I used up to one bottle which did take a while I started mixing my own and the results with my own mix have been great as well so I'd say you know go ahead and mix it yourself if you don't mind the trouble so how we going to mix up friction polish to make our liquid we've got three components here well mixing is exactly what you think take some from this can pour down a container take some from this camphor in the same container take some from this can poured in the same container I think you could probably figure that out without me telling you but that's the way you mix it up and the standard formula that I have seen after searching all over the web is really one one one one part of this one part of this one part of this or if you prefer one third of the total mixture is this one third of total mixture is this one third of the total mixture is this this is not the only formula that I found some woodturners have reported using four to one mixture of shellac to boil linseed oil I haven't tried that myself other woodturners report using tung oil instead of boiled linseed oil same same dilution one two one two one but youth tung oil instead of oil in seed oil I might want to be aware that some of products that are or have been advertised as tung oil are actually boiled linseed oil danish oil same thing the tried-and-true product called danish oil is oil in seed oil that's not the only thing I have seen mention of walnut oil carnauba wax and shellac mixture and you can probably guess walnut oil long as it hasn't been screwed up with anything is going to be safe to use and canoe backs which is completely natural and it's also used as a food coating it's safe to use so that would be a food safe version of friction polish as well I saw a couple of mentions of people adding a little bit of beeswax to the polish teaspoonful to a half a pint of the finish now when you mix this stuff up you do want to end up with a fairly thin watery liquid you don't want anything that's really thick and that's because you want it to go off then when you put it on the piece on the lathe if it's too thick you're probably gonna get some streaking in the finish after you polished it then let's show up is very tiny white lines most likely I've seen that you want to store your mixture in a cool dry place and away from light just to make it last a little bit longer and finally remember what I said about separation here we have it separated out but it looked like this when it needs to be stirred up you're gonna have liquid up here and you're going to have a thicker looking white stuff down here which is the shellac and I have observed even a little bit of separation after only a couple of minutes so even shake it up even if it's only been a minute or two since you last put on a coat so what is the shelf life of friction polish you mix it up yourself well I mentioned earlier about shellac in 3000 years old okay the shelf life is not three thousand years although I'm planning on testing that and so far that test is going very well I've read that the shelf life is about a year I can't back that up with any real hard evidence as stuff for manufacturers to say it's a year shelf life so if you have your friction polish sitting around for too long try it out make sure it's still good you might save yourself some trouble or you can just write a date on the friction polish bottle and throw it out every six months whatever now another thing I want to mention about the friction polish and the shelf life is depending on the kind of bottle you put it in the alcohol may evaporate and of course it also depends on how tightly sealed you have on the wind the alcohol will evaporate that has a chance the pause will get thicker and thicker and you may need to put some more alcohol in it before you start work so keep that in mind glass jars and plastic coke bottles are reputed to be impervious to alcohol evaporation so they might be a good thing to use rather than what I've got here which is a polyethylene bottle which is supposed to be I think allow alcohol to evaporate well this videos going to be a little longer what I thought it was gonna be and I'm gonna cut it short right here I had planned on going over to the lathe and show how friction polish is applied to a piece and maybe addressed some of the issues that might come up if you put too much on try and answer the question run the lathe fast or on the lathe slow but video is too long so I'm going to address all those issues and another video later on so keep an eye on my friction polish channel see you next video

Channel: RickTurns

Views: 128,011

Rating: 4.823256 out of 5

Keywords: woodturning, woodturned, friction polish, finishing, woodturning finish, shellac, boiled linseed, denatured alcohol

Id: fODxyikTrFA

Length: 29min 3sec (1743 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 02 2015