How to take care of wooden cases

golden_ratio_gauge1Busy again… I’ve learned how to make cases in such a way that I justify charging as little as I do. The early ones should have cost about $500 each, given the time it took to make them.

golden_ratio_gauge4Still… one of the nice things about cottage industrialism is it’s a learning process… you learn how to make things in the months (and years) after you’ve initially invented them. You get better.

Anyway… once the cases are cut, they are

– washed (yup, water)
– a coat of linseed oil
– another coat of linseed oil
– a coat of beeswax
– another coat of beeswax

Each of these stages starts with a light-sanding with very fine sandpaper… and is followed by a day or so of drying. There’s a lot of drying… then

– buff with soft cloth
– leave it for a week or two
– buff with soft cloth again

Because I’m not using varnish, and sealing the wood in a layer of plastic etc, the wood is still “living” so to speak, so you can do repairs, buff-ups yourself.

If you get a scratch:

golden_ratio_gauge5you can fix it !

golden_ratio_gauge6firstly sandpaper out the scratch using rough-ish sandpaper

golden_ratio_gauge7
then get rid of the rough-sandpaper scratches using finer sandpaper (for final sanpaperings I use paper that’s so hopelessly over-used, it’s probably more accurate to just call it “paper”)

golden_ratio_gauge8This is the linseed oil I use… it’s much of a muchness though – any linseed oil will do. They sell it at the supermarket

This is the beeswax

golden_ratio_gauge9which they sell at the local DIY place.

To be honest, I think you could skip the linseed oil and go straight for the beeswax… although buying a whole tin for just a scratch is probably overkill, and the linseed oil is useful for other things… so maybe skip the beeswax and just use the oil…

… which is a round about way of saying, I don’t think it matters too much :)

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