giant Cypress

The Shellac Redemption

Prologue: Tom Iovino has come up with a great idea, Get Woodworking Week, where the internet woodworking community gets together to write articles encouraging people thinking about taking up woodworking to jump in. I initially imagined this post as a bit of shellac trivia, the sort of overly technical article that would only be of interest to woodworking geeks, but if you stay with me, I think this does have a message for beginners. Here goes.

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Back in December Kari Hultman wrote about a batch of dewaxed blonde shellac that gave her fits:

I had encountered shellac gone bad before, but I had never come across shellac that won’t dissolve completely in denatured alcohol.

I mixed up a batch of blonde shellac but, days later, it looked like semi-masticated lemon jello rather than clear finish.

The problem was that some oxidation had set in, since these flakes weren’t kept in an airtight container. There’s something about dewaxing shellac that makes them more sensitive to oxygen exposure. This is a problem that I haven’t encountered yet, and I was curious to see how bad shellac could get. Kari was kind enough to send me the batch of shellac for me to play with.

So the first thing I did was to try to mix up a batch of the problematic shellac. I tried a couple of things that I thought might help. Instead of using denatured alcohol, I used my favorite solvent for shellac, Everclear. I made a relatively dilute mix, shooting for a little less than a one pound cut. I also let the shellac sit overnight.

One big difference between denatured alcohol that you can get at the borg and Everclear is that Everclear is 95% pure ethanol, compared to denatured alcohol which can be up to a 50-50 mix of ethanol and methanol. Methanol is highly toxic, and I’d rather not have that stuff around my house. I thought that using a purer solvent might be advantageous. Also, I thought that using a more dilute preparation would help the shellac get into solution.

This was somewhat successful. I did get some of the gelatinous stuff floating in the shellac as Kari did, and you can see some of the bits on the side of the jar in the top photo, but overall it seemed to be fairly liquid.

At the time, I was in a hurry to get some projects done as Christmas presents. Running really short on time, I went with a wine bottle stand, which is otherwise known to woodworkers as “a board with a hole in it”. I made them out of cherry, and used this batch of shellac as a finish. It worked well, much better than I expected. The board on the left has a coat of shellac on it, and the board on the right is bare.

I wound up applying about a half-dozen coats of the gummy shellac in pretty quick succession, using a paper towel to wipe it on. Occasionally I’d get a bit of sticky residue, much like the adhesive goo that holds an insert or a fold-out page in a magazine, but this would wipe off cleanly after the coat dried. After the last coat shellac, I put on some wax, rubbed it out with a cloth, and they turned out pretty good.

Action shot:

My takeaway from this is that if you have a bad batch of shellac, it still might be usable. I’m not sure if it was the Everclear or the dilute preparation (or both) that helped me out here, but I was happy with the results. There’s certainly no harm in trying it out on a piece of scrap wood to see what you get.

Clearly, it’s better to avoid this situation altogether, and so to that end I’ll just avoid using dewaxed shellac.

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What does all this have to do with beginner woodworkers? One of the most often feared part of any project is applying the finish. This part of any project is quite stressful, probably because at this point a lot of time and effort have been invested in the project, and there’s a great concern that a poorly applied finish will mess everything up.

This is where shellac and wax really come into its own. Shellac is easy to make and easy to apply. You can buy it at the local borg. It’s non-toxic, and if you use Everclear like I do, you don’t have to worry about accidentally ingesting the solvent. You can apply it without special equipment, since all you need is a cloth. It’s very easy to repair a shellac finish — just apply more shellac. Applying the wax just requires another cloth, time, and a little patience.

But the biggest advantage of shellac that I see based on this experience is that even if you have a bad batch of shellac, or if you screw up making the shellac, you still can get a great looking finish, which makes shellac and wax a perfect finish for the beginner.