ROLL-YOUR-OWN 8: JUST GLOSSING OVER IT

[SmokinLightning]

That humidor is turning out absolutely beautiful! You've got talent my friend.

Thanks for taking the time to write all this up, I've enjoyed watching it come together!

[smokum]

You know...this is truly art at its finest. Will you build me one if I dont win this one ???

[SubChop]

Al, tremendous effort!! I'm truly envious, inspired and in awe of your talent. Can't wait to see the finished product. And that Cuban mahogony is outstanding - I worked with some Sappelle once that had that kind of dual appearance, depending on your POV.

[mkz]

Thats just plain.... beautiful!!!

[Colt45]

Wow, great stuff

And worry not, the "low dangling fruits" are for the likes of KG or Smithy.

Though with all the talk of french polishing, skinning, and choking, you

could see how it might give one pause.

[anacostiakat]

Nice work brother!

[Dr.G]

Looking fantastic!

I meant to ask earlier; that diamond strip; are they individual parquetry inlays or a strip?

Cheers,

George

P.S. Any photos of those torsion boxes?

[Fuzz]

» Most commercial humidors use something called Nitro Cellulose as a finish.

I always thought nitrocellulose was a main component of smokeless gunpowder? (guncotton)

[El Presidente]

Thank Al. That looks truly magnificent

I am in awe of your skills, humour and ability to make the complex seem somehow achievable.

This has been a monumental exercise.

[SmokinAl]

Thanks guys:

Smokum, if a Breitling AF1 watch turned up mysteriously on my doorstep, then I'd have to say "Auction? What auction?" Just some food for thought mate...some foooood for thought...

SubChop, as you know, Sapele which is South American Mahogany and my Cuban Mahogany are the same tree. The difference is the same as a cuban cigar vs a dr or honduran. Soil and climate. But man, what a freakin difference.

Colt, I knew I could rely on you. I'm still plotting your downfall of course, but I appreciate your restraint.

Dr.G, the inlays are strips. I make my own if I need something special (which is most of the time 'cause I'm a picky bastard) but you can buy the ones here for about $6.00 for ~ 5'. For me to make a batch for a job would cost about $800 in time alone, but mine look much better. Stay tuned for more risque photos of torsion boxes doing their thing.

Fuzz, I really couldn't tell you if NC is a component of gunpowder but it does sound familiar. Most people call this 2 pack. I don't like the name as it sounds too much like a rapper.

Prez, thanks Pal. Do me a favour. Next time we meet up, ask me if Zana has cooked anything special that night. I was in a world of hurt when I got home last Thursday....

To the rest of you, thank you for your kind words

[SmokinAl]

Welcome to this, the penultimate chapter of Making The Hang Ten Humidor. Oh it’s been a long time coming. I don’t know what I’m going to do with my time when I don’t have to write these tutorials any more...but I’m pretty sure the fiancée and the boy will think of something for me.

We’ve cut, chipped, scraped and even ironed over the past few weeks and now, with box veneered, our trays in place, we’re ready to do some sanding and polishing to bring the woods figure out.

Most commercial humidors use something called Nitro Cellulose as a finish. This is basically a hard plastic coating which takes a lot of specialised equipment to deliver onto the wood, not least of which is good breathing gear because this stuff is NASTY. If you inhale or ingest it, it will varnish your lungs, throat or stomach. On a personal note, I don’t like the stuff because it feels like plastic. There’s not much point in making a beautiful piece of furniture by hand and then coating it in 2 mm of clear plastic.

Nitro Cellulose is used in place of Varnish which has been around for hundreds of years. When I’m varnishing I use a formula that has been around for at least 100 years that gives a beautiful rich, deep result which leaves Nitro Cellulose for dead. I can’t show you this one though as it’s a very drawn out process, not least of which is a 6 week curing time from the last coat to polishing the finish (done with very fine powdered abrasives like talcum powder to smooth it all out). Besides the time, brushing varnish is not something I’d recommend to a first-timer. It’s expensive and fraught with pitfalls. The best commercial varnish I’ve used is called “Rock Hard Table Varnish” by a company named Behlen. If you want a varnish fisnish, follow this stuff up. It’s great.

The most common finish that home handymen use is Polyurethane. I hate this stuff with a vengeance. Once applied, it’s there for life, so any repairs necessitate stripping the wood back bare. It also “Layers” which is a trap for the beginner. It’s so easy to sand through between coats and it leaves a ring that can’t be hidden.

Another popular choice for the amateur is Danish Oil or Tung Oil which is a huge no-no. These oils smell very strongly and it takes ages for the smell to dissipate. If you get any inside the box (and there’s a really good chance you will), you can throw the whole thing out.

A new-ish product is wipe on polyurethane. This is an easy to apply polish that you can get right with no past experience by following the exceedingly simple directions on the can. My problem with this is you’ll never get a fully choked finish with the stuff and like normal poly, it feels plastic (almost soft).

Another wipe-on is something called padding laquer. The company Behlen make a product called Qualasole (which is no longer available in Australia and impossible for me to buy from OS because it’s flammable and I can’t get anyone to ship it). If you can get your hands on this, use it. Brilliant results and very easy to use. Feel free to send me what you have left-over. :-)

I think I’ve pretty much dismissed all options outside of vegetable oil (best left for cutting boards) and burnishing (Japanese woodworker style) but there are a few things left.

Warning: Reading the next sentence may make you run screaming from the room.

My preference is always to French Polish.

Still there? Good.

This is a picture of the top of a DVD Cabinet I built a few years ago. It’s one of the very, very few pieces of furniture I’ve build that I actually own. There are a few things that make it unusual but at the top of the list is the wood used in the centre panels.

That’s a piece of old growth Cuban Mahogany which has been extinct for a very, very long time. Some of you may have a reproduction of this stuff screen printed onto your humidors (very common practice I fear). Here’s a picture of it taken 90 degrees from the first picture.

Quite something isn’t it. It looks like a completely different piece of wood. You can get this effect in woods using any polish applied well and rubbed back carefully, but nothing will give you the depth and lustre that French Polishing does. (I’d be scared to use anything else on wood like this, it’d be a sacrilege!)

French Polishing is an art. The way I do it (something called a vitriol finish which is generally only done on top end pianos) is both an art and an obsession. French polishing is to a Vitriol Finish what licking a toad is to dating Claudia Schiffer.

I will show you how to French Polish but if you’re dating Claudia, then I’m out of my depth (but give her my best anyway...sigh).

I’m also going to show you a neat way to cheat on the whole French Polishing thing to get nearly the same effect. In fact, we’ll start with that.

French Polishing is the process of building a clear, protective coat with Shellac. Shellac is a secretion of the Lac Beetle. You can’t make it into expensive coffee, I don’t know if the beetles are eaten by small nocturnal birds that regurgitate their nests, but I can tell you it’s completely inert. In fact you can eat the stuff. Actually, you already have. It’s used for the coating of candies such as M&Ms and in food protective’s to stop colouring from leeching onto your hands.

That’s great news for us because it negates any breathing apparatus, nasty smells or toxicity in general.

I generally buy flakes of shellac and dissolve them in Industrial Methylated Spirits. In your part of the world that may be known as de-natured alcohol. You’ll be able to find shellac already mixed in most hardware stores.

Shellac is similar to hide glue in that it re-activates. When you put a coat of shellac onto something, let it dry and put on the next coat, the old coat bonds to the new coat. This means that instead of having a few thin coats of finish like Polyurethane, you’ll effectively have one thick coat of Shellac so if you sand through the shellac right down to the wood, your next coat will fix the boo-boo!

We’re going to take advantage of this and intentionally sand right back on the first couple of coats, effectively filling up the grain of the wood to get a fully choked finish. I should mention here that if you’ve put a stain onto your wood, don’t sand through the finish. You’ll take the colour off the wood.

To do this, we’re going to add a little talcum powder to the Shellac. Too much and the shellac will go cloudy when it dries, but if you use just enough (and you do have to experiment) the shellac stays clear and is very easy to sand. It also is a little thicker so will settle better into the pores of the wood.

First things first though, we have to prepare the surface. Before you reach for the sandpaper, see if your local hardware store has some “Card Scrapers”. This is a piece of steel (traditionally made from an old saw blade” that you put a burr onto and use to scrape back the surface. It is 100 times faster than using sandpaper and it’s very easy to do. If you’re doing restoration work or just scraping off paint or poly, this method will make you think that you’ve been wasting your life with sandpaper. If you’re going to try using a card scraper, let me know and I’ll write a mini tutorial on it for you. I should mention, scraping is for hard woods only. If you use this technique on softwood it’s very likely to just tear it up.

If you’d prefer to use sandpaper (chicken) then start with 240 grit only and nothing coarser than that. Wrap your sandpaper tightly around a cork block and use both hands to push the sandpaper away from you and pull it back. Have you seen a movie of the old sailors using a Holy Stone to Swab The Decks? It’s the same technique. You want to bend forward and back at the waist. Don’t use your arms for the motion. This will (hopefully) stop you from hollowing out a flat surface.

• Start at one end and finish at the other end.

• Sand in tracks to keep it even.

• Don’t sand a low-spot, it’s the area around it that’s too high so keep following the tracks until it’s all smooth AND Level. If it’s not level, it’ll always look lousy.

• Don’t use a power sander. You’ll lose too much control and it’s just too easy to sand through the veneer.

Use the same technique to progress through 320 grit and 400 grit. You can keep going if you want, but the difference isn’t discernible to the naked eye under a finish on most woods.

Next, get a damp cloth and wipe the wood you’ve just sanded. This will raise the grain a little. Use the same piece of 400 grit to sand very lightly again after the wood has dried. The grain will spring up a little when wetted. Wiping with water and sanding means it won’t raise when you put on your first coat of shellac.

All done? Good. Get out the vacuum cleaner and vacuum the case to get off as mush sawdust as you can. An upholstery brush works well for this. An important safety tip here: Don’t let the wife catch you with the vacuum. It may set a precedent you neither want nor need.

Now, pick up your paint brush. Snap it in half and throw it away. Shellac dries very quickly and using a brush with this stuff is a technique that has to be practiced. I use a brush made from Sable Hair for this which cost squillions and I still get into trouble after 30 years of practice. The best technique is to get an old tee shirt and rip a piece about 12” square. Fold it up into a tight ball and you’ve made your first “Rubber” for French Polishing.

Pour about an inch of Shellac into a plastic container and soak the rubber in it. You might want some rubber gloves here. Squeeze out the excess shellac and bring it down about 1” in from the edge and wipe it gently across the box, lifting it slightly when it comes off the other edge. Then straight away wipe back from the opposite direction over the first wipe coming in 1” from the edge again and gliding it off on the other edge. Keep doing this, track by track until one face is covered. This is the identical to the first process of French Polishing which is called “Skinning In”.

Do all 5 faces of the box (4 sides and top) and then put your rubber into a zip-lock bag to stop it from drying out and remember to put a lid on the shellac. This first coat will dry very quickly. Probably no more than 15 minutes, but give it a few hours just to be sure. Just enough time to watch the footy.

Next, you’ll need to sand it back. Take your cork block with some 400 grit sandpaper and sand as before. There is a sandpaper called Adalox that I swear by for this. It doesn’t clog anywhere near as easily as normal paper which you’ll thank me for later. Putting a drop of water onto the sandpaper can help it to not clog so quickly. Using a mixture of dishwashing detergent and water works better still, but again, don’t let the wife see you with rubber gloves on and dishwashing detergent. That goes double for you Warren!

What we’re trying to do is get a nice a nice smooth surface. NOT a smooth coat, we’ll fix that shortly.

Keep going with your polishing and sanding until you get a surface that feels “right”. Right is smooth and flat, flat being the most important part. The great thing about this technique is if you go onto the next step and discover it’s not perfect yet, you can come back and put on more shellac and fix the dull spot.

Remember to let the water dry off the shellac and the wood completely before you put on the next coat.

Once you’re satisfied with your sanded surface (and it should only take 3-5 coats) It’s time to put on one last coat. Use the same solution and technique as previously but this time, leave the box to dry for 24 hours. We want the shellac to not just dry, but to start hardening.

When you look at the surface of the polish you’ll probably see some dust specs in the last coat. We’ll fix that and give the finish a beautiful lustre all at the same time.

You will require some wax furniture polish and 0000 steel wool.

Never try to tear steel wool. It will slice your fingers up horribly. Use a pair of kitchen scissors to cut it.

Dip the steel wool into the wax paste and get a good chunk of wax worked into it. Rub the steel wool gently along in the same direction as the wood grain. Use the steel wool to gently rub off any high spots or dust nibs. The steel wool is scratching the surface of the shellac. You want an even pattern of scratch all over the box.

The wax will start to go white as it dries. This is the time for some elbow grease. Grab what’s left of your old tee-shirt (clean and lint free) and polish hard in the direction of the grain to shine up the wax.

Feel free to give the box a few coats of wax, but on the next few, use a soft cloth to apply the wax.

The beauty of this finish is if the shellac is damaged in ten years time, you can recoat it without any preparation. Put it on straight over the wax and wax again over that.

French Polishing for dummies.

I suppose the first thing you should know is that any dummy can French Polish after they’ve been trained to do so. Whilst I would love to be able to give you that training in written form, there’s a technique involved that defies description and that is one of pressure. Press too hard and you’re screwed, press too lightly and you’re screwed...in fact, you’ve got to work really hard not to be screwed period!

The first step in the process is to apply a base coat with brush or pad of Shellac diluted 50/50 with Methylated Spirits. Let this dry for a few days and then scuff the surface with dry 600 grit paper.

The next step is where the elbow-grease comes into it. Wrapping the polishing rubber in a piece of soft linen with a light dusting of pumice stone powder on it, you start rubbing over the finish with moderate pressure. This is re-activating the polish and the pumice stone is helping to cut the polish already applied. It’s that part of French Polishing that fills up the grain. It’s called “choking the pores” hence a “fully choked finish” is one that is completely smooth. Doing this, the rubber follows different patterns across the work: straight lines; figure eights; small circles and large circles. You do this to stop following the same path and working “tracks” into the finish. You have to ensure in this process that your rubber never stops on the surface. As the polish is re-activated it becomes like glue so you really need some muscle here to keep moving.

Here you see the job about half done. If you look closely at the photo there are still a few pores open and in the reflection from the flash you can see a few “ropey” bits where the rubber has left its mark.

About three days after this, you can start on the next step which is “Bodying Up”, adding some body to the polish to begin bringing out the shine. I’ll put a few drops of paraffin oil onto the surface of the work and then go through the same process as the last step. The paraffin oil stops the rubber from dragging on the work. This step will smooth out the marks left by the last process and bring out a rich glow in the wood.

The next part of the process is called “Stiffing Up”. (Colt, leave it alone, it’s too easy.) This is the last stage in the polish and it will remove the paraffin oil and impart a high gloss to the work. Start by spitting onto the work and wiping it with a clean cloth. This will help the oil to lift so you can get it all off. Any oil left will turn to white spots over time. Using a 50/50 diluted mixture of the shellac, you continue polishing as before but this time, frequently cleaning any oil off the rubber. Once the oil is gone, put 1 drop of polish to 2 drops of Methylated Spirits into the palm of your hand, dip the rubber into this and polish up and down the grain with a light stroke. A few strokes will give the polish a final burnish and you’re done!

I hope you’ve enjoyed this brief lesson on polishing “old Skool” and I hope you may be inspired to give it a try yourself sometime. If I can be of any help, feel free to drop me a line.

In the next few days, I'll be posting the final in our series on making the Hang-Ten Humidor which is fitting the hinges and that'll be it! We can all get back to smoking and looking at El Prez's collection of Cuban Surfing Idols. Until then.

Cheers,

Al.