Megan is finishing Matt Cianci’s book “Set & File: A Practical Guide to Saw Sharpening,” and I’m polishing “The American Peasant.” Both books will go to the printer within the month, and then we will turn to our next publishing projects.
Here’s what is coming up.
Megan is (still) working on her Dutch tool chest book, and she’ll also take the reins on Jim Tolpin and George Walker’s next book, “Good Eye.” Their early drafts have convinced me this will be their best book. For this book, George and Jim are deconstructing pieces of furniture to show their underlying patterns and language.
Also in the works: Kale and I just began filming a long-form video on building and using a Roman workbench.
And I will dive into the next issue of “The Stick Chair Journal.” I have been working on the second issue off and on, and I promise it will be out before the end of 2024. The delay on “The Stick Chair Journal” has not been due to a lack of enthusiasm. Quite the opposite. My list of stories for the second (and third) issues grows every week.
Mostly, I have been stalled by our 11-month-long restoration of the Anthe building, our new fulfillment center. Finally, work on the Anthe building is winding down. This week we’re repairing the basement stairs and waterproofing the second-floor doors over the loading dock. These little projects are much easier to tackle than say: pay for a new roof, sunlight, gutter and reconstruction of the rear masonry wall.
Aside from the Anthe building, one of the obstacles to the next issue of “The Stick Chair Journal” is which chair plan we will publish in issue two. I have seven designs I’ve been working on:
Comb-back with a plywood arm and comb Settle/Settee The Shortback Irish writing chair Peasant chair The Stout Lad chair (a chair for larger body types) Hobbit chair
I want to build them all. And given enough time, I will. Since writing “The Stick Chair Book” (a free download), I have been moving chair-by-chair to a particular chair form in my mind. The two chairs on my bench right now (shown above) are a significant step forward to that chair – both in form and the natural dye I’m cooking up.
Or maybe I’m just fooling myself and “that chair” will always be on the horizon.
Andy Glenn is the author of the newly released “Backwoods Chairmakers: In Search of the Appalachian Ladderback Chairmaker.” He found more than 20 of them and earned their trust then, beautifully and authentically through words and photos, told the stories of their lives and their work, which has been handed down through generations for more than 200 years.
Andy and his sister, Mary Jo, helping their grandpa, George Fike, with a new set of cellar doors.
Andy grew up among fields of corn and soybeans on patchworked land so fertile that in 1808 Ohioans named it Richland County. His grandfather George Fike lived in an old Victorian farmhouse on about 150 acres in nearby Ashland Twp., Ohio, and had a wood and metal fabrication shop, where he worked on anything needed for the house and farm. Andy’s grandfather Lawrence Glenn was the town milkman in Ashland County, Ohio. In his basement shop he would turn old milk crates into boxes and small gifts for family.
Mary Lou and George Fike with Andy, on a rocking horse that Grandpa George made.
Projects Andy made as a child with his grandfather, Lawrence Glenn.
Andy’s family – parents, both teachers, and a younger sister and brother – lived on 11 acres. His mother had horses. Each year his father would raise six to 10 head of black Angus beef for neighbors or community members who put in an order. Andy participated in 4-H and had sheep. They had dogs.
“It was just a wonderful time,” Andy says.
Although Andy fed animals in the morning and evening, and helped care for the farm, he says he grew up surrounded by Amish and Mennonite families with children that “could run laps around me with their knowledge of things.”
Andy loved sports. He played baseball, soccer and basketball, and his parents encouraged it all, from a young age through high school.
“They’d sign me up for the local travel teams and we’d travel around the state and out of state. Now that I’m a parent, I realize how committed they were to providing opportunities.”
In the summers Andy worked as an extra set of hands for his best friend, Troy’s dad, Phil Perry, who ran a carpentry crew. Andy and Troy would spend many late nights in Phil’s basement shop, building things.
“And if we had questions, Phil would come down and give us some guidance,” Andy says. “Show us how to run a router, safe ways to run a table saw.”
Andy’s Uncle Galen made him this blanket chest as a high school graduation gift.
Andy attended Walsh University then transferred to The College of Wooster his sophomore year as a business economics major. He also helped coach his high school’s freshman boys’ basketball team, not minding the hour drive each way. He loved his college experience.
“College always seemed like it was going to be what I did,” Andy says. “My parents were the first to go to college and they really encouraged me to go to college. I suppose I was a bit short-sighted – I knew I was going to go to college but I didn’t necessarily know what was going to happen after that.”
From Business to Building
The table Andy made for his wife, Sarah, as a wedding gift.
Shortly after college graduation, Andy married his high school sweetheart, Sarah. His wedding gift to Sarah was a dining table, built in Phil’s shop. Together they moved to Boston, where Sarah, a classical violinist, attended graduate school at the Longy School of Music, just north of Harvard Square in Cambridge. Andy took a job as the business director of a small Christian high school, where he also helped with the basketball teams and coached JV soccer – a team made up of players who were fulfilling the school’s sports requirement, which made the whole experience fun but also absurd at times, Andy says, laughing.
“I thought the job was perfect,” he says. “It married my interests, my degree and my faith. I thought it would be a perfect job. And it was a nice job. But after a short time there I thought, I’m not in the right setting.”
Andy and Sarah lived in a small apartment in Somerville, Massachusetts, and Andy remembers one day coming home and showing Sarah his hands. They were smooth – not a single callus in sight.
“I just kind of realized I was chasing numbers all day and then I would never catch them and then we’d come back the next day and chase them again. And I was just kind of out of place.”
“I loved every moment of it,” he says. “Just to be surrounded by all these people who are passionate about furniture and excited about it in much the same way. It was a wonderful two years.”
Andy particularly loved the instructors, including Dan Faia, still a close friend and mentor, and Alex Krutsky, who recently passed away.
“Alex was just the most charming man and he had a real ornery sense of humor,” Andy says. “One day I came in first thing and I was doing a glue-up. I had clamps everywhere. I was sweating and moving and it wasn’t going well and I was getting anxious. And Alex, he came up the stairs in the bench room and came over the way he did and had this little smile on his face. And he just goes, ‘The reason we use clamps is so we don’t have to hold the wood together with our hands while the glue dries.’ It was a joke, but it was just perfect in the moment because I was failing miserably and he wasn’t there to help, but to add a little joke. And he would have helped me if I needed it. Now, at least once or twice a week, I pick up a clamp and smile about Alex.”
Six months later, a live-in caretaker position opened up at NBSS. Andy and Sarah moved into a little, quirky, third- and fourth-floor apartment inside the school, and Andy served as caretaker for five years.
“Everything about it was fun,” he says.
For five years Andy managed the old buildings, attending to triggered motion sensors, water main breaks and sewer fires. A job perk was using open space as he pleased, as long as he remained somewhat unseen. This provided him shop space to build. During this time Andy also taught some classes at NBSS and worked part-time job at a furniture repair shop called Second Life in Charlestown, Massachusetts.
During this time Sarah was working for the Boston Symphony’s education department. Their daughter, Ruby, was born in 2011. Ruby’s nursery was a large closet (they previously used it as an office) in their NBSS apartment. Fourteen months later their son, Francis, was born. They loved Boston but they always knew they’d eventually leave. With two kids, they decided it was time.
To Maine, Kentucky & Back Again They moved to Maine, a place they always hoped to call home, and Andy spent time dropping off résumés at various shops. He found work at Front Street Shipyard in Belfast.
“It was a very fun job but it was a J-O-B, right from the beginning, because it was all new to me,” Andy says. “People think of wispy shavings on wooden boats but it was really like grinding fiberglass off tugboat refits. It was a dirty job, fun, but dirty.”
Several months later a custom commercial cabinetry shop (Phi Home Designs – the name has since changed, now Hay Runner) called him with an opening. He was the go-to furniture guy, working on projects that passed his bench. When there was no furniture work to be done he’d help out the cabinet crew, which, he says, was enjoyable and eye-opening – the materials, approach and methods were all different. He stayed on for about three and a half years.
In 2017, a position opened up in Berea College Student Craft’s woodcraft program, and Andy and Sarah thought it might be nice to live closer to family for a bit. Andy applied, was accepted, and they moved to Berea, Kentucky.
“The college was a totally new experience for me,” Andy says. “Being a woodworker in academia, that made my head spin for a little while. But the actual job was great.”
As the Director of Woodcraft, he worked with students all day, teaching them how to make the college’s craft and furniture items.
“Each year, a number of people came into the woodshop who had never woodworked before and I got to guide them through their first woodworking experiences,” he says. “And a number of them, you could just see it – they loved the shop and they’d come in on their off hours and you could just see that build and grow.”
Former students will reach out to him from time to time, with photos of walking sticks they recently made or news of how their career in woodworking, born in Berea, is going.
During this time Andy was also tapped to help get The Woodworking School at Pine Croft, formerly the Kelly Mehler School of Woodworking, owned by Kelly and Teri Mehler, back up and running.
“Kelly and Teri were very kind to our family from the moment we moved into town,” Andy says. “Kelly was working with the college with the possibility of selling the school, selling his property – I just kind of knew of it. And then the college did purchase the Mehler’s place, and as we were getting the school started up again, that’s where my role came into play.”
But as much as Andy was enjoying his work, Kentucky didn’t feel like home. He, Sarah and the kids all missed Maine. He remembers one day he and Sarah were driving around Berea, searching the radio.
“After scanning all the stations Sarah said, ‘I wished we lived somewhere that had a classical station.’ That resonated with me,” Andy says. “Our local stations played mountain bluegrass – which is beautiful – but no classical, and in that moment it felt like we were misfits for the place.”
So in 2021, they began looking for a new place to settle. The housing market at the time felt impossible. But then, serendipity: With a better understanding of what Andy and Sarah were looking for, their Realtor wrote and said her parents’ house, which wasn’t on the market yet, seemed like a good fit. Andy and Francis took a road trip to Waldoboro, Maine, and saw that it was a perfect fit.
Andy’s shop.
“It’s an old cape, 1859, and there are projects, nonstop projects on this place, which is why it was in our price range and why we could get into it,” Andy says. “And just the amazing providential piece of it was that he had built this shop space in 2013. He was a boatbuilder, so he had a few boats in there, but it was a board-and-batten shell. And I’ve been able to keep building it out ever since I got into it.”
Today the kids are enrolled in a small school. Sarah, a creative like Andy, works a couple of different jobs, and Andy builds chairs, makes custom furniture, sells chair kits and teaches. It works.
Until recently, Andy would put time into “Backwoods Chairmakers” in the morning, “the best time to write,” he says. “It’s just been in the last few months that that hasn’t been on the front of my mind and the back of mind at all times.”
He’s in the shop for as many hours as he can be, at least until mid-afternoon, depending on the day. The flexibility is a gift, allowing Andy to end his workday as late as 6:30 p.m. or as early as 2:30 p.m., to pick up the kids from school and take them to various activities when needed. Saturdays are typically a half day of work.
“The rhythm and the way it’s going right now works for us,” he says.
Andy also enjoys being on the road and teaching.
“I get a lot of joy from teaching in the sense that there is a connection when working with people who have their own goals, who are getting started in the craft or who are excited about a new project or skill,” he says. “I get to participate in that experience.”
On Building a Book
For about a year and a half Andy traveled to chairmakers’ homes. He’d visit, take notes, with permission record interviews, then come back home and write as much as he could about the visit and the experience.
“I was obviously and clearly an outsider visiting these chairmakers in Appalachia,” he says. “I kind of knew that right from the beginning. What I didn’t know was that Lost Art Press and this book idea really carried no weight. The chairmakers were intrigued by it, but it was fairly abstract.”
He learned some things along the way, including the necessity of a doorstep explanation versus a phone call from states away.
“The first couple of chairmaking visits I’d get all my gear out, right as I was getting out of the car,” he says. “That was the wrong approach because we didn’t have any rapport. Slowly I learned I needed to get out and we needed to just sit and talk for a while. And then the chairmaker could size me up and size up the project and decide if and how they wanted to contribute. And from there we could get going.”
He wanted the chairmakers to know that he wasn’t writing a quick one-off story with a photograph attached. Rather, he was going to be in touch again to make sure he got things right, to make sure he was telling the story fully and correctly.
Newberry and Sons. Red Boiling Springs, Tennessee.
“Usually, as we would sit and talk at the beginning, we’d reach a point where the chairmaker would say something along the lines of, ‘Well, we better get going if we’re going to do this.’ And that was my signal that it was time to work,” he says.
At first Andy had a collection of essays that didn’t relate. But once the traveling came to an end he was able to look at the essays as a whole and find commonalities, forming the book’s structure.
He also noted different themes: design, family, contemporary building methods, marketing.
“Each maker kind of had these threads that they emphasized,” he says.
Once he identified them, Andy would tug on those threads during the writing process, and call each chairmaker to follow up with questions along those lines.
He also looked for repetition. Every chairmaker mentioned dry rungs and wet posts, and as such, Andy had written about dry rungs and wet posts a dozen times. So he began paring what had already been said to make the stories more interesting.
Turning in the manuscript and photographs to Lost Art Press prompted a bit of withdrawal.
“That book was with me daily for years, and now it doesn’t need me anymore,” Andy says. “But I loved the travel piece. The appreciation for those chairs took me places that I never would have traveled to without this project. It took me into communities and into back lanes and to meet people that I wouldn’t have met otherwise. So there was just always an excitement around it, around travel and meeting other people. And it always felt like we had chairs as our commonality and we’d always come back to an appreciation of these chairs. That gave me a great place to start from as they shared their messages for making.”
A New Way of Thinking about the Intersection of Work & Life Although the book is complete, it’s still very much present in Andy’s daily life.
“I know it’s affected my work,” he says. “I’m by no means an Appalachian chairmaker but I can see the influence. I’ve been thinking about this every day for quite a while now. So it can’t help but permeate some of the work I’m doing. I loved meeting these people who made chairmaking, woodworking craft, furniture making, a part of their life. And it really changed how I quantify work.”
Andy used to think of work as part-time, full-time, 40 hours a week.
“Their lives had none of those parameters around it,” he says. “For a number of them, there were times to make chairs and then there were times when other things were more pressing. And that might mean because the shop is cold in the winter and so winters are for other things and recharging. And in the spring you make chairs. Or it gets really hot and so the summer is for gardening and other work and in the cooler periods you get into the chairs. So I stopped considering it as part-time, full-time, and I just started looking at it more as a part of life.”
Some examples of Andy’s work.
In addition to chairmaking, custom furniture builds and teaching, Andy reads a lot. He enjoys photography. He deeply appreciates the wildness, quietness and ruralness of Maine. He appreciates long nights by the woodstove.
“Our kids are at an age where they’re quite active and we’re about with them,” he says. “On Wednesdays I’m a goalie for a co-ed soccer team. Everyone here is like, ‘Oh, hockey!’ And I’m like, ‘No, soccer,’” he laughs.
He also finds that time spent in his shop and teaching complement each other wonderfully.
“I do love working in the shop by myself,” he says. “But after a stretch of that I want to teach. I want to be around other energy, other ideas. I enjoy that I get to teach and share and then come back to the shop and recharge, explore some new ideas and then go back out and teach again.”
For the first time Andy plans on teaching some classes in his shop, this spring. The 40′ x 30′ building has two floors. Currently the second floor is being used for storage as he outfits the first. He’s built walls, installed lighting and electricity, and he’s starting to get benches and machines, things he’s been acquiring since moving back to Maine, in place. Although he’s always had a bench, even in his apartments, he’s been spoiled, he says, due to the access he’s had to the shops everywhere he’s worked.
“I have more ideas than money,” he says, laughing. “I know, that’s everyone. I see how this will all come together in the end. I just keep working on it step by step.”
As of this writing Andy’s working on a custom timber-frame style bed out of large beams of red oak. And he’s working on a chair – he’s always working on a chair, either for himself or someone else.
“I really just love the process of making a chair,” he says. “Everything about it from the idea to the physical process of handling the materials, splitting it out, shaving them if I’m making a greenwood chair, all the way to putting the finish on and seeing how that chair comes together at the very end. I just really enjoy making, I think.”
Andy says he’s always been drawn to something chairmaker Curtis Buchanan said about 15 years ago.
Andy’s family – Andy, Francis, Ruby and Sarah.
“He just described his work and how family is close by and important to him, and how his shop is behind his house and how everything is kind of linked together and intertwined, and I found that appealing,” Andy says. “I enjoy having the shop behind the house and being able to work from home. Other things are more important but the shop is right here for work where it fits. And sometimes that’s more hours out here, sometimes it’s less. It’s just here as it needs to be.”
Megan is teaching a class on building a Shaker silverware tray here at the storefront this weekend, so y’all are stuck with me and Wally the cat for Open Wire.
We are happy to answer your woodworking questions here on Open Wire. Simply type your question into the comment box below. Post it. We will read it and answer as best we can. Know that Wally has only one answer to every query: “Treats, in my mouth.”
Sometimes there is a lag between the asking of the question and the typing of the answer. But I will attempt to answer all questions. Sometimes we answer them after comments have been closed – it just depends on our schedule for the day.
The following is excerpted from Robert Wearing’s “The Essential Woodworker” – one of the two of our books I most frequently recommend to those getting started in hand-tool woodworking. (The other is “The Anarchist’s Tool Chest.“) “The Essential Woodworker” is filled with more than 500 hand-drawn illustrations by Wearing that explain every operation in a hand-tool shop. His illustrations are properly drafted, drawn in perspective and masterfully clear.
– Fitz
Wooden handles, apart from those manufactured commercially, fall into two categories, turned and bench made. There is no great distinction between those for drawers and those for doors.
In Fig 489, a shows the quickest, easiest and cheapest form, often found on modern mass-produced furniture. A length of material is machined to section then sawn off in length. It is seldom produced by hand using moulding planes, but can quickly be made with a power router. Such handles are fixed, generally horizontally, by two screws from the inside of the drawer. Screwed-on handles, possibly in more exotic woods, in forms similar to b are an improvement.
Quality handles, in woods such as rosewood and ebony, c, are tenoned into the door or drawer. If the tenon is brought through it can be wedged. These handles show end grain on the front; this polishes well to give a most attractive appearance, but if the tenon is slotted and wedges inserted, the handle will split, d (B). The wedges must therefore be inserted at the ends, d (A). A handle tapering towards the user will need a finger grip carved underneath, e.
A full-width handle, f, housed into a drawer front gives a good grip, particularly for larger drawers. It is very effective in oak and similar woods, and where a number of drawers is stacked vertically as in a chest of drawers. The dovetail housing can be stopped just short of the top edge of the drawer.
Turned handles (Fig 490) always present end grain to the viewer, so the finish on this face must be immaculate to exploit its appearance to the full. Although these handles may be screwed from the inside, they tend to work loose and rotate; very little extra effort is required to turn a small tenon and to bore the drawer front for it, and you will be happier with the result. Set a caliper to the drill and turn to this size. Unless you are working with small pieces of exotic woods, a number of handles are turned together between centres and then parted off. The face is finished off finely by gripping the tenon either in a wood chuck or in a drill chuck. A great variety of shapes is possible and those in Fig 490, are typical. By careful paring or disc sanding, polygonal features can be introduced, B. An inlaid central contrasting dot can be added, e.g. sycamore or holly in ebony, C. Turning and bench work can combine to give bar handles, D, in which the use of contrasting woods may be effective. This style does not appear to be used in the vertical form. In oak or similar chunky woods a rotating latch can be arranged, E.
An 1803 advertisement for linseed oil, “boil’d” or “unboil’d.”
The following is by Steve Voigt, whom you might know primarily as a maker of wooden planes. But he’s also passionate about traditional finishes, and has been taking a deep dive into that subject as he works on a book for Lost Art Press. The working title is “Oil, Resin, Solvent & Pigment: Making and Using Traditional Woodworking Finishes.” We have no publication date yet, but here’s a little taste of what Steve has learned. – Fitz
A few years ago, I went looking for a period-appropriate finish for the handplanes I make, and fell into an enormous rabbit hole. Ever since, I’ve been making and researching traditional oils, paints, varnishes, and other finishes. I’ve written a number of posts and an article on the subject, and I’m currently working on a book for Lost Art Press. Along the way, I’ve found there’s a lot of confusion about boiled linseed oil (BLO). That’s understandable – it starts with the name itself. But the real problem is that the truth about BLO has become obscured behind a haze of myths and misconceptions. In this post, I’ll try to clear up some of the confusion.
A brief note on the products mentioned below. I don’t have experience with all of them, because I generally do all my oil processing from scratch, starting with high-quality, cold-pressed oil. I’ll try to be clear about what I’ve used, and what I haven’t. My goal here is to disentangle the various oils that are BLO or BLO-adjacent, so you can make informed decisions about what you want to use. I have no financial relationship with any of the companies mentioned here, and won’t make a nickel from anything you might purchase.
Modern BLO Most woodworkers probably know what’s in the BLO available at the hardware store: Raw linseed oil and heavy metal driers (mainly manganese and cobalt). The mixture may be heated to help disperse the driers more quickly, but heat does not play any important part in the process. In the late 19th century, for reasons I’ll explain below, this stuff was known as “bung hole oil.” I’m not a fan, for a couple reasons.
First, the oil the manufacturers start with is not the high-quality, cold-pressed stuff I referred to earlier; it’s cheap oil that’s been hot-pressed and solvent-extracted. The main difference, from the user’s point of view, is that it’s going to darken or yellow over time, much more so than good oil will.
Second, there’s no way to know exactly how much cobalt and manganese are added to the linseed oil. Based on how quickly it dries, my guess is that they use a lot. This is important, because the more drier you add to a finish, the more quickly it will break down. A lot of woodworkers believe – erroneously – that any linseed oil finish is destined to turn grimy and black in the long run, and one can find plenty of furniture examples at the local antique mall that seem to prove the point. But the culprit is usually either too much metal drier or improper processing of the oil.
So there are better options available, and we’ll cover them. But first we need to talk about what BLO isn’t, and has never been…
A varnish factory, from “The Manufacture of Varnishes and Kindred Industries,” Vol. 2.
Was BLO Ever Just Boiled? The most pervasive belief about BLO is that back in the good old days, it was just boiled until it bubbled like boiling water, without those nasty metal driers. It’s an appealing story, but it’s pure Internet myth: Since the Middle Ages, BLO has been made with metal driers. The idea of making a fast-drying oil without driers is a good one, but it’s a modern notion, born of our concerns with toxicity and the environment, and not old or traditional.
The notion that oil was simply boiled involves a misunderstanding of both the chemistry of oil and the historical meaning of the term “boiled.” When water boils, it undergoes a phase change from liquid to gas. Oil does no such thing. If you heat linseed oil to approximately 620°F, it starts to rapidly decompose, giving off small bubbles of carbon dioxide (CO2) as it breaks down. If you’re lucky, you can hold it at this temperature for about 15 minutes before one of two things happens: Either it will turn into gelatin, or it will burst into flames. If you manage to avoid these fates, you’ll end up with a dark, viscous oil that will dry modestly faster than raw oil, and will yellow badly. It’s not a particularly desirable product, and that’s why BLO was never made this way.
So where did the “boiled” in BLO come from? Part of the answer is that the term didn’t always have the precise meaning it does today: “Boiled” was simply a synonym for heating. But it’s also important to realize that until recent times, freshly pressed linseed oil was a lot more raw than the stuff we buy in the store today, and contained a fair amount of water left over from pressing. “Boiling,” then, may simply have referred to heating the oil hot enough to boil off the residual water. In his seminal three-volume work on finishes from 1899, The Manufacture of Varnishes and Kindred Industries, J.G. McIntosh writes “a moderate heat [is] applied so as to eliminate moisture. The slight ebullition caused thereby is not to be regarded as the “boiling” of the oil, although in former days it probably gave rise to the term.”
Now, this doesn’t mean that heating oil without driers is ineffective; in fact, there is a long tradition of doing so. But these oils are more properly called “bodied oils,” and have historically been used for either printing inks or as paint additives. Heat alone has only a moderate effect on the drying speed of oil, and oil cooked without oxygen will actually dry more slowly than raw oil. To get a faster-drying oil, we have to combine heat with oxygen, sunlight or metal driers.
Smelting lead in the 15th century, from Agricola’s 1556 “De re metallica.”
OK, Then How Was Traditional BLO Made? For centuries, BLO was made by cooking linseed oil with naturally occurring forms of lead oxide (PbO). The most common of these is litharge, which is still available today; you can buy it on eBay. Here are instructions from the DeMayerne manuscript, a 17th-century collection of recipes for painting, varnishing and related disciplines:
Take of the oil one half sextier, Parisian measure which weighs about 1/2 lbs, put into a newly glazed pot and throw in a half ounce of lead monoxide, stir a little with a wood spatula and let it simmer on a weak fire under a covered stove or in the yard for two hours. The oil becomes less, but only a little. Let it settle thoroughly and pour the thickened oil off by tipping the pot, and keep it for all kinds of uses.
Note the instruction to “let it settle thoroughly.” Litharge is only partially soluble in oil, so you want it to sink to the bottom of the pot before you decant the oil. But in addition to speeding up drying, litharge also plays another crucial role: It actually refines the oil.
Today, most people buy linseed oil in its raw, unrefined form. But historically, it was much more common to refine the oil before using it, because raw oil contains a lot of foreign material, called mucilage (sounds and looks like mucus!) that your oil is better off without. Oil can be refined in lots of different ways: It can be centrifuged with acids or alkalis, which is common in industrial refining, but it can also be simply shaken with water, a practice common in pre-industrial times. Or, it can be cooked with litharge, which acts as a precipitant, causing the mucilage to separate. The result is a dark colored but clean oil that dries quickly. That’s traditional BLO.
In the late 19th century, liquid driers (containing lead, manganese or cobalt) that fully dissolved in oil were invented, and a simpler, cheaper method of making BLO took hold: Driers were simply poured into the top of a barrel of oil. The driers would sink down, mixing with the oil, and the resulting “boiled” oil would be withdrawn through a spigot at the bottom of the barrel, known as the bung hole. Thus, the name “bung hole oil” was born. Unlike traditional BLO, bung hole oil is just raw oil, with all its mucilage, and a lot of cobalt and manganese. When it was first introduced, it was held in low regard. The state of New York even passed laws to discourage its manufacture. But faster and cheaper usually wins out in the marketplace, and today, nearly all BLO is bung hole oil. The only exception I’m aware of is Rublev’s dark drying oil, which is made in the traditional manner. I haven’t used it – I’d rather not mess with lead in any form – but if you’re curious, it’s available. Keep in mind that lead is particularly toxic for children.
If you want a lead- and mucilage-free BLO that’s far better than the bung hole oil from the hardware store, it’s easy to make your own. Go to an art supply store and buy a bottle of alkali refined linseed oil. To 500 ml oil, add 5 ml Japan drier, and mix thoroughly (500 ml is just more than a pint, and 5 ml = 1 teaspoon). “Japan drier” is an imprecise term, and different brands contain different mixes of driers, but Klean Strip from the hardware or big box store will work fine. If this dries too slowly, add a little more drier, but remember, in the long run, the less the better.
If you don’t want to mix your own, Heron paints sells a pre-mixed version that looks very similar (I haven’t tried it myself, but I’ve heard good things about their products).
If you’d rather avoid heavy metal driers in any form, read on – there are a number of options available.
A couple alternatives to bung hole oil.
BLO Alternatives When I started woodworking in the 1990s, BLO from the hardware store was pretty much the only option available, but now there are many different brands of processed linseed oils you can buy. Some of these are good alternatives to BLO, and some are not. There are many I haven’t tried, but here are a few I’m familiar with.
Tried & True Danish Oil, unlike most other so-called Danish oils, is 100-percent linseed oil, with no driers or volatile organic compounds (VOCs). I spoke with Joe Robson, the founder of the company, who confirmed that it’s a refined oil that has been heated and oxidized. It’s a nice, light-colored oil that dries faster than raw oil, but not as fast as BLO. You’ll need to apply thin coats and wait 1-2 days between applications. If that’s not a problem, you’ll find that it gives far better results than BLO.
Ottosson boiled linseed oil dries faster than Tried & True, and is made from cold-pressed oil. I’ve used it and like it, but the company is a little guarded about what’s in it. On the product page is stated that “the raw material is cold pressed stored and absolutely pure raw linseed oil which is heated to approx. 140° C.” However, on another page, they write that “both oxygen and metal salts are added to make the product more reactive.” I wrote to Ottosson for clarification, but didn’t receive a response. More generally, I get a little irked by their claim that the oil is purified by storing it for six months. This doesn’t refine the oil; there’s as much mucilage in these oils as there is in fresh oil (try washing some, and you’ll see). Despite these reservations, I think Ottosson BLO is a big improvement over hardware store BLO.
There are some processed oils that are better avoided if you’re looking for BLO alternatives. “Stand oil” is made by cooking linseed oil at high temperatures in an oxygen-free environment, so it actually dries more slowly than raw oil. It’s useful as an additive to paint, but not ideal if you’re looking for a transparent wipe-on finish. “Blown oil” is made by blowing air through the oil until it becomes very viscous. It dries more quickly than raw oil. While blowing can be used to make a nice oil for woodworking, commercial blown oil isn’t ideal; like stand oil, it’s best used as a paint additive. Sun-thickened oil is the same deal. You can sun thicken oil to whatever viscosity you want, but the stuff you can buy is very thick and, once again, is probably better used as a paint additive.
Making Vs. Buying You may have noticed a theme in the previous paragraph – the gap between what could be commercially available, and what is. We’ve all been trained to view finishes as something you buy, which means you’re stuck with whatever is available. But once you start thinking of finishes as something you make from raw materials, a world of new possibilities opens up. Oils, paints and varnishes can all be made to have the characteristics you want, rather than what some giant multinational company thinks you should want. This is a big topic – far too big for one blog post – but I’ll continue to explore and write about it in the coming months and years.
