Thread: Eucalyptus oil as a finish

I've heard of Eucy Oil being used as a food additive and I've personally used it as a solvent, a fuel additive and as a fuel in it's own right.

But I've never heard of it as a primary surface finish.

Besides I'm pretty sure Eucy Oil is already slightly acidic (don't take it as gospel, but I think it's around pH4 or thereabouts) so the recommended 'directions for care' seem odd to me.

Have only seen it mentioned as a solvent that dissolves a lot of resins like mastic, etc. For varnish purposes. I would guess since turpentine and "spirit of wine" (alcohol) are mentioned for a lot of spirit varnishes in old books, eucalyptus would be an additive solvent for resins that don't dissolve in a more common spirit varnish solvent.

I've never heard of its use as a drying oil. "orange oil" is just a citrus terpene.

Eucalyptus oil is also well known toxin.Its use as a flavouring additive is for a specific type of Eucalyptus oil at extremely low levels (0.002%) so one does have to be careful with bulk amounts.According to Wikipedia, - There were 2,049 reported [toxicity] cases in New South Wales between 2014 and 2018, accounting for 46.4% of essential oil poisoning incidents.- The probable lethal dose of pure eucalyptus oil for an adult is in the range of 0.05 mL to 0.5 mL/per kg of body weight so a 20kg child only needs to injest between 1 and 10g !And well before you died you get VERY ill so I'd be a bit more careful with it than with other finishing oils.

Apologies for the compacted text in my previous post - there's some odd character in there that causing it to do this - have tried deleting and reposting - also not the formatting icons not appearing in the editing screen.