Thread: Shellac Over Pummice & Wax???

His methods are what some would object to, but I too can't understand how the shellac is curing at all with the wax being underneath. Well, we've seen it and it works, but I would rather use the shellac and pumice together to clog up the pores. I also feel he used way too much pumice, but why it isn't showing up in the grain has me stumped. Everything I thought I knew about french polish has been thrown out the window waching this guy work

Sam.
One Aussie saying that I hear , I never use it myself but I think it applies here is.

Yeah Na !

That's on the wax and pumice and on most of the rest of it.

He made it shiny. And he and did a below average finish on it that no Pro Ive ever met would be happy with.

The talk at the end about spiriting off at the end! He's lost on that and bluffing his way along quickly and vaguely.


Study the grain and reflection between 40.20 and 40.33 . He has made the open grain very dark and the final finish is ridgy and not smooth.
Untitled 1.jpg

Its a thumbs down from me as far as a good quality FP job goes. He doesn't seem to understand the bodying up process and the finishing off and the wax and pumice just seems crazy.

I'm shocked he even stripped the piece. That was quite an easy reviving job from what I could see. The colour difference didn't look huge enough to bother. The client if there was one may have wanted a new and even coloured finish though and not minded paying for 5 times as much work?

Plenty of comments seem happy with his job. There's not many Pros left and there's a lot of people wanting to do it themselves which is a good thing. Good on the guy for doing what hes doing I suppose. Trying what hes showing could be a step in the way to getting better for some.

Rob

Originally Posted by auscab

Sam.
One Aussie saying that I hear , I never use it myself but I think it applies here is.

Yeah Na !

That's on the wax and pumice and on most of the rest of it.

He made it shiny. And he and did a below average finish on it that no Pro Ive ever met would be happy with.

The talk at the end about spiriting off at the end! He's lost on that and bluffing his way along quickly and vaguely.


Study the grain and reflection between 40.20 and 40.33 . He has made the open grain very dark and the final finish is ridgy and not smooth.

Its a thumbs down from me as far as a good quality FP job goes. He doesn't seem to understand the bodying up process and the finishing off and the wax and pumice just seems crazy.

I'm shocked he even stripped the piece. That was quite an easy reviving job from what I could see. The colour difference didn't look huge enough to bother. The client if there was one may have wanted a new and even coloured finish though and not minded paying for 5 times as much work?

Plenty of comments seem happy with his job. There's not many Pros left and there's a lot of people wanting to do it themselves which is a good thing. Good on the guy for doing what hes doing I suppose. Trying what hes showing could be a step in the way to getting better for some.

Rob

Totally agree Rob. My first thought was OMG What is he doing!. Shellac over wax!?, no chance, why would you even risk it. I didn't know if there was something I was missing, so I thought I'd draw attention to it here. As you pointed out in the screenshot, you can clearly see ridge and furrows, the mind boggles.

Like the rest of you I thought it was an unorthodox method. I wonder if he has confused crushed whiting and pumice? I've never heard of pumice as a grain filler, leastwise with wax. When I was learning French Polishing, the idea was to use a very small amount to create a slurry of timber dust which would fill the grain, so the pumice was an abrasive. Somewhere in an old text, which I cannot find now, I read that too much pumice is the source of other problems. I never got the hang of using pumice like this, it always ended up in the grain pretty much straight away rather than abrading the timber and making a slurry. I generally grain fill just with heavy shellac before bodying in. I think one of the things that saves his method is using a heat gun and wiping off excess which will drive the wax into the wood and leave very little on the surface. One old text I have suggests that after grain filling, one of the things you can do is oil the wood with raw linseed oil to make a drag-free surface when bodying in, so aliphatic finishes like oil and maybe wax (not a coating of wax) are compatible with shellac. I haven't oiled before bodying in and I'm kind of surprised, not from the view of incompatibility, but because wouldn't it dull any figure and fire you might bring out with the polish? I generally touch the rubber with a bit of paraffin oil. Then there are stoppers for filling larger cracks and faults made out of beeswax and a resin such as Beaumontage and the shellac will stick fine to that. I think one of the reasons the finish is a bit wavey is his technique because he doesn't allow the rubber to overlap the last line of rubber marks sufficiently to cover all the parts of the surface not already rubbed.

I use a little Paraffin oil when French Polishing. Don't know if that's the correct stuff to use but it seems to stop the fad from sticking anyway.

Originally Posted by EagerBeaver71

I use a little Paraffin oil when French Polishing. Don't know if that's the correct stuff to use but it seems to stop the fad from sticking anyway.

I think it’s what our Divine Sovereign recommends

In the UK French Polishing and other more modern finishes formed part of the Cabinet Makers City & Guilds qualification back in the 1970's/80's (not sure about today) so we were taught to use fine pumice powder between coats to denib and fill the grain.

Originally Posted by Camelot

In the UK French Polishing and other more modern finishes formed part of the Cabinet Makers City & Guilds qualification back in the 1970's/80's (not sure about today) so we were taught to use fine pumice powder between coats to denib and fill the grain.

The old guys I worked amongst who were pro polishers used pumice the same way. It was finely sprinkled in small amounts while bodying. In between layers after the first coats of shellac that were dry by a day or two old. So it’s the way I use it.



Building a body of shellac and filling the grain and cutting back the right amount means you can get away with not using pumice. It has its uses though on very traditional work .
With new stuff though, I never use pumice.

Originally Posted by auscab

The old guys I worked amongst who were pro polishers used pumice the same way. It was finely sprinkled in small amounts while bodying. In between layers after the first coats of shellac that were dry by a day or two old. So it’s the way I use it.



Building a body of shellac and filling the grain and cutting back the right amount means you can get away with not using pumice. It has its uses though on very traditional work .
With new stuff though, I never use pumice.

Hi Rob, Is the goal of bodying up to have a completely smooth surface without grain of any sort showing?. Are there any circumstances where you would want to show some texture?.

Originally Posted by EagerBeaver71

Hi Rob, Is the goal of bodying up to have a completely smooth surface without grain of any sort showing?

My version of an explanation is that Bodying is just applying and working layer of finish. Most of the time its building a body to fill the grain and get a smooth finish. Its the part before the finishing off stages start where you have to use a thinner solution on the later.

Originally Posted by EagerBeaver71

Are there any circumstances where you would want to show some texture?.

Yes . If your matching a new job to an original open grain finish is one. That is the only one I can think of ATM.

For me the use of pumice was only to fill the grain once you were happy that had been achieved you would continue just adding more coats of shellac to build up a body, the bodying process gives the finish a depth and enhances the figure of the wood.

It's important to fold and make a good quality rubber

How to make a French Polishers Rubber - YouTube

This below link shows how I would apply the pumice with a pumice bag, but this link is not totally the way I was taught to apply the shellac, I would charge the rubber and then use a figure 8 motion to apply shellac to the surface of the piece and would only stop the figure eight and work in the direction of the grain to remove any swirls caused by the rubber dragging the shellac due to me overloading it (squeezing it too much) and making the rubber surface sticky. In this link the guy is adding shellac from the bottle and pouring it onto the face of the rubber and not unfolding the rubber and recharging it which for me is not correct.

The great thing about a shellac finish is you can rectify your poor finish by adding more alcohol to soften the shellac and then keep applying coats until you achieve a quality finish.

French Polishing with Mitch Kohanek - YouTube

There's some funny ways of doing stuff and every one to their own .

Ive always just dipped the rubber in the pot of shellac and squeezed the excess out. Usually along the bottom with my thumb if the rubber is not to big. Two thumbs if its large enough. Its fast but you do get sticky fingers. I like big ones for large jobs of course. Little ones for the small work. New ones are good for when you want to get a lot of polish on and old ones are kept in a separate jar for finishing. They let out shellac a lot slower.

Ive shown these before .

That's a sprinkle of pumice just been applied to the sticky shellac. The tin of pumice. And a rubber with the polish pots. The cut off bottoms of Orange juice bottles. The pots are still going . They don't die!
IMG_7683.jpg


And the top of the best Antique extension table I ever did. Its not finished there. Its still got a glitzy looking reflection. Well on its way though. Worth a big Pic. The GB workshop next door upstairs was doing one or two of these every month in the late 70s when I was an apprentice .
IMG_7699.jpg



Rob.

Once I switched to making the cover for my rubber out of linen and using paraffin oil I achieved really good results. I used to dip it in the shellac but then I saw someone using a tomato sauce bottle to charge the rubber during bodying in, and a second tomato sauce bottle with neat alcohol to dilute the rubber during spiriting off and dampening a rubber neat for the final stages I found it very handy.

Here's a straw poll. Who thinks a French Polish is a very thin layer? Who thinks it is quite thick? Wondering because there are so many descriptions of many many layers applied I wonder what people's perceptions are?

One other thing on the wax from the OP video. Remember unless you're using dewaxed shellac, it already has wax in it.

Slightly off topic, but I don’t understand why the Yanks insist on staining almost everything walnut colour. That table would have looked great if he had just French polished the raw mahogany.