The three best finishes you're (probably) not using

this is a bar of soap and this is a wood finish made from soap and it's one of the most underrated wood finishes out there it's low VOC it can be made in your home kitchen and it's the most silky smooth surface you're ever going to touch so I want to show you how to make this as well as two other deeply underrated equally low VOC finishes and how to apply them so let's [Music] go oh I'm going to need a refill early on this week huh so I was in the shop last night finishing up this sculpture which if you've been watching me for a while you may have noticed has been over there for quite some time over a year because I've just been chipping away at it in my free time it's a gift for a friend and now that it's done I went to go put finish on it and I stopped and I thought this actually might be a really good opportunity to have a conversation about some of the Lesser known finishes in woodworking now sculptures by my admission don't need hyper durable finishes right they're they're usually kind of soft finishes something that feels nice to the touch but doesn't need to take the use and abuse of say a dining table the finishing techniques that I use on my sculptures are Furniture finishes they're just not the ones that are highly plasticized and you know they're not epoxies they're not your things but they are traditional finishes and they have their place in furniture and as a bonus they are essentially VOC free now I'm no chemist I don't understand voc's I admit but they are to my knowledge VOC free and if not they are very low on the VOC scale and as we become more aware of what voc's are doing to our environment and to our bodies these are things that are becoming more popular again especially if you're working in say a garage or a basement and you have a partner or children that's less than ideal so let's have a conversation about how I finish woodworking pieces with some of the shopmade finishes that you can make in your shop or even as I did this morning in your own kitchen with no worries about the effect of them on you or your family oh coffee finish number one on our list today is soap a soap finish is a very traditional Danish finish and uh I think it's fallen out of favor or maybe it never had favor in the Western World I don't really Sweden is in the Western World we'll say in the States because it's not hyper durable right and that's a fair thing to to consider to worry about how durable is this finish going to be but I will say in traditional Danish cultures that is a finish that has been used on chairs on dining tables and even on flooring so it's not not durable but this is a conversation less about the finish and more more about how we perceive wood and its durability I think we're constantly afraid that if the wood gets dirty then it's a bad thing which fair so we have to seal the wood and we have to put this plastic barrier between the dirty outside world and the pure goodness of the tree and yet you are finishing it with soap so even if the bloody thing gets dirty or if there's a stain or if there's a water ring you know how you fix that is you just take a little bit of the finish and you wipe it back on there there and it both refinishes and cleans it so yeah like I don't I don't think it's that bad a finish at all and to be fair this is the most tactilely pleasing finish I've ever put my hands on and I've put my hands on a lot that sounded inappropriate I have no I I can't say I've touched a lot of wood either oh boy uh I have groped a lot of furniture no no no this is a kids channel all right let's try this one more again I've been making furniture for a long time I have felt a lot of different surfaces and of those surfaces the soap finish is without a doubt the most tactilely pleasing of them so I want to show you how we mix some of this up because it's very very easy I did it in 20 minutes this morning in my kitchen and then I want to apply some of it to this sculpture so I and show you how easy it is to apply all right so here's how it starts you have a bar of soap preferably unscented because nobody wants to smell like a fragrant soap on their Furniture this is just a plain unscented bar of Dr Bronner this is the kind of thing you just buy at the regular grocery store or department store or you can order it online very easily you're going to take this and you're going to take equal parts soap in equal parts water and boil it that's all it is you can drop a whole chunk of soap soap in there but it's going to take forever to melt down so instead you can either grate it or you can just use a knife and chop it up like I did this morning and so what you're going to be left with are kind of soap shavings so 2 oz of soap to 2 oz of water boiled it for probably 15ish minutes and just continued to add water every now and again as that water level slowly dropped because it was evaporating away and ended up with a very thick kind of liquid Castile soap which I saved and bitty little bit of in here so that we can go through how you process it up now this is s solidified cuz there's not very much of it in there but we can reheat this and I can show you how we then whip it because what we're looking for is not a liquid soap what we're looking to get is this kind of a Whi creamy Mery substance all this is is after I've melted the soap and water together you just whip it up and it just air rates the whole substance and you end up with this light fluffy stuff so what we're going to do is we're going to go getto woodworking style we're going to use a heat gun a heat gun is going to be your best friend or a hair dryer a good haird dryer will also do but this is going to be your best friend when we're working with natural finishes because natural finishes are either liquid or solid very few of them have kind of a runny gel state so this is going to help you warm stuff up I'm just I'm just going to do this for a minute hold please I've got a bowl I've got a whisk and I've got some liquid soap so we're just going to we're going to do that now I can take a whisk and I can beat this up by hand but I'm lazy so I'm not going to do that ghetto woodworking this is going to increase in volume substantially so I'm just going to drop this in here and I'm going to start whipping slowly at first and then as it gets more air rated and thicker I'm going to increase the speed so that I'm not just flinging soap everywhere and then once it gets to a point where the bubbles have be become non-existent to the eye and it just looks like whipped cream and it's starting to build some small Peaks soft peaks I think that's a mering term then then we're good all right the time has come to put some finish on this bad boy so let's get busy I am going to apply this uh soap finish with a white scotchbrite there is no abrasive in this white scotchbrite it's just a Brill pad you can also do it with a rag or on sculpture very often you do it with like a brush a toothbrush a stiff bristle brush something like that so you have options it doesn't actually matter all that much I'm going to take what I have in here and just transfer it to my bin over here get a little bit of soap on there doesn't take a lot you know just just enough and I'm just going to start applying just rubbing it on like I would an oil finish with a brell pad same thing no different on this I'm going to do the sculpture first and then I'll do the uh base after that and that's it guys I'm I mean I wish I could pass this around to you guys like this was a real class cuz just handling this object right now it it's so gorgeous to touch it's just perfect and you can see you get this really beautiful kind of low luster Sheen that's that buttery Sheen that I'm often talking about when I'm looking for in a finish 10 out of 10 would recommend on to finish number two now all you really need to manipulate beeswax into a finish is heat you could take this whole chunk drop it in a double boiler and let it cook down it would take a while because it's a big old brick and so in order to speed up the process what I do is just like the soap I'm going to grate it or I'm just going to slice it up and just kind of you know do a ghetto shaving is that I don't even know if that's an appropriate term anymore we're going to call it backyard woodworking even though we're not in a backyard now I don't need much cuz I'm only going to do a little bit of finishing and that's probably enough for right now I'm going to take the heat gun I'm going to heat it up from the bottom so I'm not blowing those chips everywhere and then we can apply it to this bad boy now applying finish to a sculpture into a flat surface like a piece of furniture is a little bit different if this was a piece of furniture I would take the wax and I would take a Brill pad the same way that I did the soap piece and I would just wipe it on and I would wipe it off but for this because it's a sculpture it's got all of these tiny nooks and crannies which are going to be difficult to get finish in and that's again where our heat gun comes into play I'm going to take my finish and I'm just going to apply it with a little pad in little tiny areas little by little and then I'm going to heat it up with my gun and that will allow two things to happen first and foremost it's going to allow me to spread that mixture farther because as soon as the hot wax touches the cool sculpture it's going to start to harden so by heating up the wax and and the sculpture simultaneously it's going to allow me to spread it farther but also and this is more important I think what you're doing is also allowing the wax to flow into the pores of the wood clogging the pores of the wood you're essentially sealing that surface and for our purposes as contemporary furniture makers who aren't too worried about the weathering of this piece over time with our finishes or at least with our traditional finishes it's going to give you a smoother Sheen it's going to give you a more buttery surface because those pores aren't keeping how am I trying to say this those pores are now flat and smooth and it's allowing the light to reflect off evenly rather than with just a thin oil those pores are just going to soak that uh oil right up and it's just going to leave an undulated surface you can see how this is just leaving a bunch of wax on the surface here so let's go ahead and hit that with a little heat and turn this on low and you can see it flash off and then it's going to go to melt and I can start to spread that around and whatever wax is in my actual PAD as well that wax in the pad is also going to help as I apply it to the piece cuz that's going to melt down and make it easier to spread and that's it that's the whole game it's just apply heat wipe that's it and you can see like it is a gorgeous gorgeous finish and it feels like it's a little it's stickier than the soap finish for sure but it has a very natural feel to it it feels it the luster is gorgeous and it like it just it smells like beeswax like what else what else do you want out of life now you may be asking yourself all right Eric uh that looked like you put a lot on and that's fair when you're refinishing this sculpture it's you don't need a lot so that was a bit excessive but two things number number one if you have too much wax on there it's very easy to remove the excess you just heat it up and you take a little cloth or a paper towel and you just wipe down the excess once it melts because then it absorbs into the towel and it's off the sculpture so no big deal don't lose any sleep over it and lastly I actually usually apply this with a toothbrush but I didn't have a toothbrush here so we use this it worked just fine and you can see I didn't even use all of the stuff that I melt it up like that literally I did the whole sculpture with just that little bit so it goes a long way what I've got here is a very simple mix that I use on all of my furniture it's literally just beeswax and turpentine that have been mixed in a double boiler to melt the beeswax into the turp and what it does is it allows you to kind of keep this it's not fluid by any stretch of the imagination but it's much softer than the beeswax we just used I don't need to melt this to apply I can just scoop it and spread it like kind of a paste wax but but the premise of this video is low voc's and environmentally friendly and turpentine is neither of those things so we're going to mix up a variation on this that you can use as a complete finish and all you need to do that is your beeswax and an oil medium there are commercially available variations of this finish out there things like tried and true is I believe just beeswax and linseed oil so you can just go buy a jar of this or you can make a jar of it because learning how to make your own finishes and doing your own processes in the shops allows you to be more particular about the thing you're looking for whether that be the texture the consistency the application or just having a fresh batch on hand when you need it which is always nice what I'm going to do is I'm going to drop this in the jar and then I'm going to take my heat gun and I'm going to melt this down the same way I did before again this would be easier to do in a double boiler but hey we're working with what we got this is nice and melted our tongue oil however is cold so as soon as I put this in the jar it's going to start to solidify the wax which you know we're just means we're going to have to heat it up a little bit again and that's totally fine Again part of the reason it's easier to do this in a double boiler as far as a ratio goes when I'm mixing up my own I tend to do a 1: one: one ratio of wax TP and oil and that works really nicely but we're not using TP here I'm going to do kind of a 2:1 oil to wax ratio and that should be kind of exactly what I'm looking for I'm eyeballing it guys this isn't scientific this is Art now again jar still hot been a couple of minutes I'm going to tip it this way a little bit though so I can see roughly how much is in there okay that is actually still quite substantially hot tip it this way so I can eyeball it and then again I'm just going to aim for that much twice that's all I'm doing so yeah that probably looks about right now you can immediately see how this is starting to solidify in there so we're just going to do the same thing again I'm going to heat it up with the hot gun hot gun the heat gun uh and melt that wax into the oil and look I I cannot stress this enough you do have hot oil and hot wax just don't light it on fire you know just pay if it's smoking stop heating it up now everything looks good the wax is all melted into the oil so we got to give that a few minutes to cool you could apply it right now while the wax and oil are hot to allow it to penetrate deeper into the material that is a very viable technique that's a fair thing to do but just be aware this is probably too hot to touch and we all know that hot oil in skin don't play nicely together so wait for it to cool at least a little bit so that it's warm to the touch but it's not going to burn you fast forward a couple of minutes all I've done is taken this jar and run it under the cold water for literally 3 and 1/2 minutes I have the timer going we've gotten it to a point where it's exactly the consistency we want it not a lot of it here obviously the more volume you have the longer it's going to take to cool but eventually it will and eventually it will look just like this just a kind of smooth creamy consistency light in color now one thing I do want to point out the color of this is a little bit lighter than the color of this for two reasons number one this is still a little bit warm but also I used oil in this and this is just simply beeswax and turp so that's going to be slightly lighter now the consistency should be the same how I can't get my bloody hand in there how am I going to get that out we can do we'll do the old popsicles scoop all right now all we're going to do is buff this onto a piece of wood this is a little a little bit thicker than I would normally like it so maybe I needed to add a little bit more oil it's still nice and soft it's nowhere near as hard as just straight beeswax but in the future I think I just didn't do quite enough oil in there so probably maybe a 3:1 Ratio or maybe just what I poured in wasn't quite a 2: one both are perfectly possible it's almost exactly what I want but I want it a little creamier than it is right now and that's it that's the whole thing I mean look at that surface it's gorgeous and it is essentially no voc's now again I don't know if tongue oil technically has voc's but if it does it's very low so friends there you go three environmentally friendly finishes that are not only underrated finishes I think but also just genuine Delights to have aack experience with so don't undersell these things you got your soap you got your wax and you got your oil wax combo they all have a place in Furniture don't let anybody tell you otherwise now a couple of things before I get out of here real quick number one I have a patreon so if you guys want to join a fantastic Vibrant Community over there get more access to the things I'm doing in the shop behind the scenes footage and early access to add free videos you can check the link in the description for that I've also got some merch over on Bon fire so you can check the link down below to get some dope T-shirts if you want to support me that way and I also have a new podcast where I talk about all things design and creative process with my two very good friends Mary Sai and Paul Jasper it is a phenomenal little podcast where we dive deep into all kinds of things that are not typically woodworking podcast related and as a for warning I do use profanity over there watch your profanity right I'm sorry I keep it off the channels where the kids can watch and learn but over there it is I mean we're taking off the gloves and we're going punch for punch with a couple of heavyweight designers but for now it's time for me to get out of here so I can go give this to my friend I can bring this back home and I guess I can mix up some more of this because no doubt I'll use some of it in the future so friends go get in the shop go make a thing and try to enjoy it if you can and until next week [Music] cheers

Channel: ENCurtis

Views: 146,846

Keywords: which woodworking finish is best? / beginners guide, woodworking, finishes, wood finishes, woodworking for beginners, rubio monocoat, odies oil, arm r seal, odies oil review, polyurethane, boiled linseed oil, diy, tung oil, shellac, how to finish wood, how to stain pine, how to apply clear finish to wood, wood finish for beginners, woodworking tips, woodworking tricks, best finish for wood, easiest finish for wood, easy wood finish, easy wood clear coat, encurtis, Erik Curtis

Id: WkfgH4UmxUY

Length: 19min 53sec (1193 seconds)

Published: Sat Feb 03 2024