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Can shellack get to old? I found a bag of shellack flakes that I hadn´t used for a couple of years. Only to find out that it wasnt really in the mood to get dilluted with alcohol. well, it does, of course get dilluted, but much sower and requiring more alcohol.
Hi Anders, Last week I throw away a half kg of super blonde shellac. The flakes were already grind to nearly powder. I bought it 5 years ago. It dos not dissolve in a standard dilution. Also there was a wax residue, although it was dewaxed!
Thanks for your anwers. I didnt grind these flakes because they were very clean and seperate. sometimes the flakes kind of make big balls that are difficult to seperate and then they get a few hits with a hammer while they are inside a cloth and a minut or two with a handblender. That way, the alcohol also dillute the shellack faster.
I don't know from experience but I have ready many times that if it starts taking a long time to dissolve it's past it. It will have trouble hardening again.
I know that once mixed it doesn't last forever either.
Dewaxed shellac that is bleached can go off and not perform well. That means not drying or not dissolving.
The Blonde and Super Blonde shellacs can have issues that are different from normal performance. These lighter shellac bodies can be treated with bleaches to make them lighter, it's thought the bleaching process can injure the shellac over time. Some batches can go bad and some don't. You have to observe bag by bag.
The Bysaki, Garnet, and Button should last longer in the bag, several years or more, but the bleached or "filtered" shellac needs to be monitored.
Normally I use dewaxed shellac. A old (restorer) man asked me, why I don't use button shellac. He promised me that this shellac gives me a harder and more resistance finish for my guitars.
What is exactly the difference and what do you think about this?
I have regular button shellac on a thing I made in 1994, theres no problem. Clarity might be an issue. Shellac with wax left in it seems to be more "self healing", the edges of the injured area close and round over.
It can also be a bit soft, although I think when shellac films take fingerprints, or soften it might be probably the way it was applied and not the shellac at fault. When shellac takes fingerprint I suspect it is because the worker applied in such way as to not allow the layers to evaporate out the vehicle, alcohol, and the film becomes thick and wet. Then it can take a while for the stuff to dry and weather conditions can effect the wood under the shellac or other problems, of course if the shellac is good. I almost never have a bad bag of flakes, but I think it happened once or twice in the past. There were some lines of shellac product that many people bought and had trouble with, some of the lemon yellow stuff had issues for example, but by now those lines have been vetted off the market by customer reports.
A follow up I heated the mixture a little bit. Just to some 30 celcius a night over and that helped a lot. I also made a test on scrap wood and it dryed as it normally would (very fast) and was hard. But I ended up throwing it out because I would hate myself if it would have created problems on a guitar.
I´ve recently mixed up some shellac that i had in the shop for maybe 4 years or so. I prepared three batches: blond dewaxed, some dark garnet (don´t know if waxy or not) and kusmi buttonlac. From the three, the dewaxed blond was the only one that did not dissolve. I also heated it a bit, but to no avail. 2 months have gone by and it´s still the same. The buttonlac dissolved the fastest, and was what i ended up using. All of them were sent through a coffee grinder first.
Of course i will never know how long they were sitting in the seller´s shop. Maybe the blond was there for ten years and the button arrived the day before my order. I bought them all at the same time, though, and it does seem to give some weight to the hypothesis that blonde dewaxed goes bad quicker than other, less processed, types of shellac.
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