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Anders Eliasson -> RE: Parrafin oil - Vaseline oil (Jan. 26 2013 7:35:26)
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quote:
Is the oil used for lubrication for pumice pore filling?
no no no no..... Never anything else than alcohol when porefilling with pumice.
The oil is for lubricating the pad when you French Polish. Shellack dries very fast and if you dont use oil, the pad sticks and leaves marks in the finish.
The problem with oil is that you need to remove it.
Tradition says olive oil, but it never dries away, so you need to remove it with something, which is quite a lot of work. Parrafin oil evaporates pretty fast, so you dont have to remove it. It evaporates. It actually evaporates so fast that when the weather gets hot, you need to use a thicker oil on the pad and the you can remove that oil with parrafin oil, which also works as a thinner for thicker oils, meaning you can also mix parrafin oil with a thicker oil when its hot in the workshop.... etc. etc.
And so is French Polishing all the way through. There´s no final recipe. You have to find your own way which is based on trial. (thats why all the tutorials I´ve seen are so bad because they make you think you have to do it in one way) The Pad needs to move smooth and work for at least some minuts and you have to remove the oil after each session. If you dont remove a thick oil like olive oil, then you cant see your work. It all looks pretty until the oil is gone.
Also, you have to learn how much shellack to put on or in the pad and you have to learn how much pressure to work with. This last thing is easy to see. If you leave swirl marks when you polish, to much shellack comes out of the pad. This because you have to much shellack in or on it or because you use to much pressure. If the pad sticks, then you are either making to sharp turns or there´s not enough oil on the pad.
I charge my pad with shellack from the inside and i put oil on the outside. And then I start with very little pressure and gradually put more pressure on the pad when there´s less shellack in it and finally I do long strokes, adding a drop of alcohol on the outside of the pad. This in order to level the surface and remove little marks from the pad.
French Polishing is a very intuitive and organic proces. It has little to do with brain work. Put some nice music on and play with you pad. Nothing can go wrong everything can be removed.
The problem with French Polish is that when you do it in order to make money, then the process seems very long and you easily push to much. The perfect solution is to have a seperate FP room and then take all the time you need, leave everythinbg to dry for days and continue working in the workshop at the same time.
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