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What do you guys do when you polish a pipe w with no stain on it. It seems to me that the tripoli are coloring the briar a little? What do you guys do. Jump straight to White diamond?


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Don't do it. True "white" briar turns gray with use.

It doesn't take much stain to stop the gray from happening, though.

Yeah, I don't make "virgin" pipes for this reason.

It's easy to seal a pipe enough for a rustic or blasted finish, just give it a little "glow" with thin shellac, and same goes with a smooth. I like the term "natural" better than "virgin" because it is uncolored briar, though there is a finish on the top.




But like LL says, leaving briar bare is just asking for a greasy gray pipe which will slowly turn a mahogany color with use (they all do anyway). But for any polishing protocol using tripoli or any of the usual pipey sorts of finishing tools, you need to have a seal-coat on the wood to work with.

Sasquatch, Would danish oil be suitable as a "sealer" for a natural finished pipe to prevent the graying over time or would you lean more towards the shellac?

Danish Oil is fine, shellac is fine, both will give the pipe an amber hue though (ultra super crazy wonder blonde shellac would be less so).

There's also a product called Wood Turner's Finish from General which is a water based urethane emulsion, and it makes hardly any color change at all on briar.

Sasquatch wrote:There's also a product called Wood Turner's Finish from General which is a water based urethane emulsion, and it makes hardly any color change at all on briar.

So I definitely had picked a bottle of this up to play with, and I sure as shit couldn't get it non-streaky for the life of me. Any advice there?

Non-streaky, you mean it's not going on in one perfectly smooth featureless coat?

Put it on super thin with a rag, one pass. Let it dry, don't even look at it, it'll look like shit. Buff lightly with tripoli, now look at it.

Basically polish it off, which is what you do with shellac anyhow.

Right?


Can I get an amen??

I have been experimenting with the shellac flakes. Once its dry it has dust and crap stuck in it. Do you usually buff with tripoli once finished? to smooth out the shellac. I tried to use white diamond to smooth it out but it was just stripping off the shellac. Maybe i need to slow down the buff wheel. I had it running at 1200 rpm.

Yes.

Buncha stuff - sounds like you maybe have a bit much on there. Thin 'er down some more.

We aren't looking to make a shellac finish. Not the way you'd multiple-coat a table and walk away. The shellac is going to bond to the wood, expand some cells, fill some microscopic voids. In other words, build a surface that can be polished on top of.

So yeah, strip the shellac off - a tiny bit will be left behind in the structure of the wood, and you want to wax on top of this, is my take on it.

If you buff shellac FAST, it melts. Stuff melts at 85 C. So you have to have a slow/cold polishing process or you'll lift/twist/tear the shellac on there.

Ok thanks again Sas. My shellac does look kinda think. I will try cutting it in half with denatured alcohol to thin it out like you said i think that is my first problem.

Sasquatch wrote:Non-streaky, you mean it's not going on in one perfectly smooth featureless coat?

Put it on super thin with a rag, one pass. Let it dry, don't even look at it, it'll look like shit. Buff lightly with tripoli, now look at it.

Basically polish it off, which is what you do with shellac anyhow.

Right?


Can I get an amen??

I'll give it a shot, thanks Sas. Amen?

All you can do is try it. It seems stupid, all the "try it and find out" stuff on this board, but it truly is a thing where we all do it a bit differently. I suspect there isn't a single "serious" pipe maker on this board who could go through a day in ANYone else's shop and not say "Why the FUCK are you doing THAT?" at some point.

Mileage varies.

Equipment, temperature, application.... it's all individual. Make something work. Except, as advice goes, that's not useful, so all a guy can do is say "Here's what I do." and hope it works for others.

Sasquatch wrote:a tiny bit will be left behind in the structure of the wood, and you want to wax on top of this, is my take on it.

If you buff shellac FAST, it melts. Stuff melts at 85 C. So you have to have a slow/cold polishing process or you'll lift/twist/tear the shellac on there.

The Grand Old Brit factories used gum arabic as pre-final-wax surface filler. Maybe they chose it instead of shellac because of heat resistance?

Might be worth a test drive:


https://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss ... gum+arabic

I thin my shellac a little (I buy premix french polish which is already fairly thin).
I brush on a heavy coat, get the whole thing well covered with one layer and I brush it on several times. I then give it just a few seconds to sit while I get a paper towel ready and then I start wiping it off and I keep wiping until the surface is dry with no streaks or patchiness. If I do get any streaks I just brush on another quick coat and wipe again. Seems to work fine for me.

LatakiaLover wrote:

Sasquatch wrote:a tiny bit will be left behind in the structure of the wood, and you want to wax on top of this, is my take on it.

If you buff shellac FAST, it melts. Stuff melts at 85 C. So you have to have a slow/cold polishing process or you'll lift/twist/tear the shellac on there.

The Grand Old Brit factories used gum arabic as pre-final-wax surface filler. Maybe they chose it instead of shellac because of heat resistance?

Might be worth a test drive:


https://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss ... gum+arabic

I've heard this, but isn't gum arabic highly water soluble, like, if you get it wet, it gets sticky kinda thing?

Sasquatch wrote:

LatakiaLover wrote:

Sasquatch wrote:a tiny bit will be left behind in the structure of the wood, and you want to wax on top of this, is my take on it.

If you buff shellac FAST, it melts. Stuff melts at 85 C. So you have to have a slow/cold polishing process or you'll lift/twist/tear the shellac on there.

The Grand Old Brit factories used gum arabic as pre-final-wax surface filler. Maybe they chose it instead of shellac because of heat resistance?

Might be worth a test drive:


https://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss ... gum+arabic

I've heard this, but isn't gum arabic highly water soluble, like, if you get it wet, it gets sticky kinda thing?

It definitely can be sticky. In some mixtures/formulations/etc. it's outright usable as a glue. In others, it's good as a "ground" coat (meaning pore/grain filler) for wood. Violin makers have long used it that way. I've never used it myself, on pipes or otherwise, but the Old School guys say it was definitely part of the English factory finishing process, and it certainly sounds like it would work for that after a bit of experimentation.

RickB,
I found that if you use a piece of old pantyhose, knee highs like my wife wears when she is wearing slacks to work, (Don't laugh) a piece of silk, rayon; that kind of material that the Wood Turner's finish goes on very smooth without looking like a WWI no man's land and you can put multiple coats on one after the other. You can do that until it looks like glass.

After the normal experimental routine' I have found this to work very well.

shikano53 wrote: ↑Tue Sep 10, 2019 9:47 pm RickB,
I found that if you use a piece of old pantyhose, knee highs like my wife wears when she is wearing slacks to work, (Don't laugh) a piece of silk, rayon; that kind of material that the Wood Turner's finish goes on very smooth without looking like a WWI no man's land and you can put multiple coats on one after the other. You can do that until it looks like glass.

After the normal experimental routine' I have found this to work very well.

Awesome, I'll give that a shot - thank you. I've done enough TIAFO to find something that's working pretty well on my smooths (read as "nice patina but still shiny after 50 smokes"), but that doesn't mean I'm not still chasing better