When Johnson stopped making wax with carnauba, I was out. Then they stopped making their wax entirely.
That left me looking for a wax with carnauba, though, and briwax is an option, but it's pretty heavily thinned and the solvent is toluene. Strangely, we can no longer get toluene at the home store (aromatic, fast solvent - aromatic is important for solubility of carnauba).
At any rate, I decided to make my own, but instead of a little bit of carnauba, I decided to make one wax that's all carnauba and another that is 50/50 carnauba and candelilla wax. They are 25% cut in xylene, and 75% turpentine. I hadn't found reasonable price good smelling turpentine. Xylene is foul - a slower aromatic solvent than toluene and not as sweet smelling. If toluene were an animal and died at the side of the road, it would smell like xylene. Fortunately after the stink of melting the stuff together, little xylene can contact air in the solidified wax and it's a lot more tolerable to use than it was to cook.
Point here, 25% carnauba wax to make a pound was about $14.
The candelilla mix was about the same. Wax is 25% of each (carnauba will still be solid even if it's half solvent), with solvent being the remainder. I am glad I made them.
Fast forward, I remember someone telling me about microcrystalline wax and how expensive it is (renassance, LV "tool" wax) and I knew this was a matter of being put over a barrel with something not that expensive in components, but perhaps attractive to a limited market and thus sold in small quantities since it's not just absolutely dirt cheap to make like a "carnauba" wax that's really a tiny bit of carnauba and a whole bunch of paraffin wax.
For reference, a brand name microcrystalline "tool wax" from LV here is $16 for 40ml and the house labeled stuff is about the same for 100ml. Where the discussion caught my interest is the need to be sparing. It's an artificial need.
Amazon here carries two grades of microcrystalline wax for $8-9 a pound. That pound would be enough to make somewhere between a quart and half a gallon of "tool wax", and since it's paraffinic, I'm sure the solvent can just be varnish maker's naptha, or if slower drying is desired, hydrotreated mineral spirits ($20 a gallon). So somewhere between just under 1 and 2 liters for about $20. I have plenty of soft wax, so I chose the microcrystalline bars that melt at 160F instead of 130F. I only wish I'd kept my empty cans of briwax and johnsons as getting an appropriate container is more difficult (especially if using turpentine as a solvent in any of the waxes) than making the actual waxes.
We'd do each other favors if we talked about this stuff a little more often so we're not blowing money on tiny package specialty products that aren't really anything special. I'm kind of surprised there isn't more of this vs. the nonsense you see from YT gurus about mixing oil, thinner, and polyurethane together.
the next other thing on my list is making some of the "ceramic finish" which is just nanosilica in a finish. It can be anywhere from 30 to 90 dollars an ounce, and as far as I can tell, it's mostly solvent, and an undisclosed finish resin (probably acrylic or urethane) and just a little bit of silica. I found nanosilica being sold for about $14 shipped to the US for 100 grams. the "carbon method" discussion drove tracking down the ingredients. The silica is such a small component even in the bottles that there might be enough nanosilica there to make a gallon of "ceramic coating". I plan on putting it in a urethane and then using a crosslinker with the urethane to make it truly hard.
None of these little ventures is a tenth as complicated as making a fossil resin varnish