How to Make Non Toxic Paste Wax

Ive used plenty of paste wax in my wood working adventures and never worried about the ingredients until I started making utilitarian items. My finishes for bowls, cutting boards, or any other item to be used with food are solvent free and 100% natural.  I thought Id share a recipe for non-toxic paste wax.  The best part is its super easy and you get to melt stuff!
So heres the catch, you married men should first request clearance to the kitchen.  Well be melting wax in a double boiler on her stove top.  Godspeed.

Assuming you have permission to use the kitchen (I dont want any messages from angry wives, they scare me) you will need a few items.

• A pot to boil water in (can be one of her pots as long as you have permission)
• A metal container in which to blend your melted wax and oil (I used the same container for storage)
• A heavy duty grater (seriously, dont use the cheese grater you got as a wedding present)
• Bees Wax
• Carnuba Wax
• Tung Oil / Walnut Oil
• 1/3 cup measuring cup
• The most important item!  Pliers or vise grips to remove the mixture with.
• Something to stir with.  Non melty is a plus!

The least fun part of this project is grating the wax.  Especially if you have a wimpy grater.  Had I considered how hard wax is compared to cheese, I would have coughed up the extra cash and bought a good grater.  Oh well.  The recipe I used is pretty simple.  

• 1/3 cup Bees Wax
• 1/3 cup Carnuba Wax
• 1 cup Walnut or Tung Oil

This makes a wax that is easy to apply and buff out.  Changing the ratio of Bees wax to Carnuba wax will change characteristics of your finish.  Carnuba wax is very hard and brings out great luster to a piece.  Bees wax can also give a nice shine, but will dull more quickly than Carnuba wax.  

So why use Bees wax at all?  Well, its much cheaper and is more malleable.  If you had a paste wax that was just made up of Carnuba wax and oil, it would be a crumbly mess.  Aside from that, I dont want my cutting board to shine like a new Lamborghini after treating it with paste wax.  This is the main reason for using a blend instead of just one wax.  By altering the recipe, you can control the sheen and durability of a paste wax finish.

Enough of the wordy stuff, let get on with it already.

Before you start melting wax, add enough water to the pot so that the water level is about 1/2" below the top of your melting container.

Add the wax and oil to your container and turn up the heat.  You can go ahead and crank it up, but be sure to turn the heat down before the water starts to boil.  You dont really want water in your paste wax, so try to avoid it.  A little wont cause any major trouble, but just be mindful that the less water in your paste wax, the better.

Once everything is melted, you can take the container out of the pot of water with pliers.  The stuff is kinda hot...  Spilling is not recommended.

As the wax cools, keep stirring the mixture so that the oil does not separate.  Putting the container on a cooling rack helps to speed up the cool down process.  Ive also put the container in the fridge for about a minute at a time when the mixture is fresh out of the hot water.

Once the wax is cooled, its ready to use.  Be sure to write down your recipe so that you can repeat it once you run out, or so you have a starting place for changing up your paste wax recipe in the future.

This is a basic recipe and you can certainly add colorants or metallic flakes to the wax for a different effect.

I hope you enjoyed the post.  Let me know if you try it out for yourself and feel free to comment or ask any question you may have.  Thank for reading, yall! 

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Denatured Alcohol Drying

Heres a "rip the band-aid off"quick write up of how I dry my green roughed out bowls using alcohol.
If you have any experience with turning green lumber, you probably also have experience with throwing away bowls that have split or cracked beyond the point of repair.  You may have also encountered a piece that has warped so much during the drying process that finish turning your bowl would be an exercise in futility.

To the rescue is a myriad of drying methods that are used by many turners so reach the same end result, dry bowl rough outs that arent cracked or overly warped.

Before I started using denatured alcohol (DNA) to dry bowls, I used paper bags with a handful of shavings in the bowl to slow down the drying process.  My success was about 50/50.  As Ive gotten busier and begun turning wood that is more green, Ive found that my bagging method was less and less effective.  This spurred a search to increase my success rate with turning green wood.  The two methods I was down to trying was boiling the wood or DNA soaking.

While I like fire as much as the next guy, I dont have a great area to set up a propane turkey fryer to boil a large container of water for drying my bowls.  In addition to that, I normally have to do my work in relatively short periods of time.  I seldom have a full day or afternoon to dedicate to roughing out bowls and then boiling them.

The appeal of DNA soaking for me is that I can drop rough outs in the solution as I finish them up and can forget about them for a while until I either need to add more rough outs to the tub or remember to pull the currently soaking bowls out.  For my larger tub of DNA, I wrap the top with plastic wrap to help seal the tub and prevent the alcohol from evaporating.  This probably isnt required, but its cheap insurance that doesnt take long to apply.

Soaking Method:

• Put roughed turned piece into DNA bath
• Leave it for at least 24 hours, longer for more green pieces (no real quantitative guidelines here...)
• Remove piece and pour excess back into tub
• Let dry for 15 - 30 minutes
• Wrap outside and rim of bowl only with paper
• Store bowls upside down allowing air to reach inside of bowl (sticker similarly to dimensional lumber)
• Piece can be finish turned as soon as two weeks after removal from Alcohol.

Who doesnt love pictures to go along with instructions?  Yeah, thats what I thought!

Supplies:

• 5 gallon bucket for pieces up to 10" diameter
• 13 gallon tub for pieces up to 18" diameter (Agri Supply)
• Denatured Alcohol (Agri Supply, chemical wholesaler)

Additional Information:

• David Smith has written a fair amount about DNA drying.
• AAW forum

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