Busy 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.
Still… 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:
you can fix it !
firstly sandpaper out the scratch using rough-ish sandpaper
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”)
This 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
which 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 :)
