The Perfect Woodworking Finish. EVERY SINGLE TIME!

75% boiled linseed oil, 25% shellac. One part carnauba wax to one part beeswax to four parts boiled linseed oil to two parts citrus oil. I just gave away the ending, but that's okay. Because it's more important to talk about how we got here and why. And this experiment is brought to us by Squarespace. I have spent over $1,300 and many weeks refining and coming up with the perfect formula. I am neither a chemist, a scientist, nor an expert in any field. Your safety is your own responsibility. Ple

ase do not take any of my words as fact. Instead, conduct your own research. Always take all the necessary precautions when handling unknown substances. This video is intended solely for entertainment purposes. You're probably better off buying something off the shelf. This finish is expensive. It takes a lot of effort to make. It's not shiny. It's not nearly as protective as polyurethane. It's not the easiest to apply and it doesn't dry fast. It is 100% non-toxic safe to smell and touch. It com

es out flawless every single time. It's the perfect sheen for my style and it smells amazing. This is the perfect finish for me. Maybe not for you, but I will now be using this on most of my furniture. This experiment wasn't done for YouTube content. This was supposed to be for me. So I don't have a lot of footage of the experimentation and the trials and errors. I will say this is the most research and prep I've ever done for a video. I've got weeks of experimentation and trying to figure out t

he right formulas. You can buy a great wood finish right off the shelf, but I'm a maker. I enjoy the process of experimentation and creating my own blend that works with my workflow. And it's cool to know exactly what is in the finish I'm using. And I can be completely certain that it is a hundred percent safe. This whole rabbit hole started when I watched a video on Thomas Mosier and their process. Thomas Mosier makes some of the most amazing furniture. They're just a big inspiration in what I

do. In this video, they said they had their own proprietary blend, a boiled linseed oil with the addition of dryers and resins. Our revised oils proprietary blend that contains a percentage of linseed oil with the addition of dryers and resins. They did one coat of this blend. And the next day it gets a top coat of wax or lacquer. This new oil treatment allows for an overnight dry time and creates additional protection that is close to the surface. Similar to a top coat. A day's drying time is a

llowed. And then the piece is lightly sanded ready for the final finish. I really love the idea of a two day process and Thomas Mosier makes some insanely high end furniture with perfect flawless finishes. So this all started when I watched this, I had no intention of making my own finish until I saw this video. They said it's a proprietary blend of boiled linseed oil with dryers and resins. The resins could be anything from lacquer to shellac. We'll come back to that in a second. For drying age

nts, I did some research and Japan dryer is great for boiled linseed oil. Japan dryer speeds up the oxidation process and helps boiled linseed oil dry faster. The Japan dryer worked great and sped up the drying time, but it smelled awful. You can tell this stuff is not safe to breathe or touch. It's made up of 97% naphtha and 3% cobalt compounds and is very toxic. It was at this point, I wanted to go down the most natural and safe path instead of a fast finish. I decided I wanted an all natural

finish. I have a certain sensitivity to certain chemicals where I can taste it on my tongue hours later, as well as getting headaches. I also have a healthy fear of cancer since that's how my father passed away. And side note, lacquer is one of those things that I have a bad reaction to. I've gotten really good at spray lacquer, but I feel sick every time I use it. Even when I wear the full mask, I went into this thinking, I want this finish to be all about speed and ease, but then I completely

pivoted and I want the most natural finish I can possibly make. I'm trying to make the safest and most natural finish that I can. I have a couple of choices for all natural finishes. There's pure tongue oil and raw linseed oil. They're both plant-based and all natural. They both take weeks to dry through a process called oxidation. Boiled linseed oil is raw linseed oil that has been cooked with additional solvents. It's not actually boiled. It's just heated and then has some solvents added to it

. This helps the linseed oil dry much faster than raw linseed oil. We're talking like 24 hours instead of a week. There is a difference between curing and drying. Not something we need to get into right now. Curing might still take weeks, but drying might take 24 hours. Boiled linseed oil not only dries faster than pure tongue oil, it also dries harder. So this is the route that I'm taking. The stuff that you get off the shelf has solvents, so not completely natural. So I went down a whole rabbi

t hole trying to find boiled linseed oil without solvents. Came across this pure Swedish boiled linseed oil. To be honest, any boiled linseed oil that you buy is probably totally safe, even with the solvents and dryers added. I'm just being extra cautious and picky and I'm enjoying the rabbit hole. On their website, they say it's cold pressed and stored for six months so impurities can settle. The oil is then heated to 140 degrees for seven days. It's a natural treatment without any chemical add

itives and then decanted. After deciding to not add a drying agent and being okay with it taking 24 hours to dry, the next part of the equation was adding a resin. And like I mentioned earlier, this could be a number of ingredients. I'm guessing Thomas Mosier is using a lacquer, but that's only a guess. I knew right away that shellac would be the all natural resin I wanted to use. Shellac is an all natural resin secreted by the female lac bug. It sounds disgusting. You can get shellac in liquid,

which may have unnatural ingredients or as flakes that you dissolve yourself. I want to control as much of the process as possible. So I went with the flakes and I got the dewax flakes because the dewax is less cloudy. It's more clear and mixes better with other ingredients. The flakes with the wax is just not going to mix well with other things. So you want the dewax. Most people use denatured alcohol to make their shellac finish, but denatured alcohol contains poisons to make it non consumabl

e. Otherwise it would just be pure alcohol that you could get drunk on. I want to avoid denatured alcohol because of those poisons. A great alternative is 95% Everclear. I got this from the liquor store. You can get different percentages. You want the 95%, the highest one that they offer. The lower percentages have more water, water and oil don't mix very well. Fun fact, when I got this from my liquor store, I had to sign a piece of paper saying I would not use this for human consumption. I'm no

t even sure why they sell this at the liquor store. I just thought that was a little weird. 95% Everclear can be hard to find. And in some States you can't get it at all. I thought I was going to go down this route. This is hand sanitizer grade ethanol. It's basically this, but it has been denatured, poisoned, but it's safe for your hands. And so I thought I was going to go down this route. So safe to touch. You just can't drink it. Then I decided, you know what, let's go all in. This is 99.97%

ethanol. Pure grain alcohol. I got a five gallon jug of this from a local chemical supplier. So I have spent so much money and time trying out different formulas. I thought I was going to go the medical grade ethanol. I thought I was going to go the Everclear route. And these are expensive. I found the price per ounce gets cheaper when you buy a five gallon container of ethanol. And then after testing out this boiled linseed oil, I did like it. I love the results that I got from it. So then I bo

ught four more gallons of this and then two, one pound bag of shellac. This finishes a two part process. We're going to first create the liquid part, and then we're going to create the wax part. So the liquid part is the boiled linseed oil with the shellac resin, but we have to make our shellac first the shellac part of the formula. We're using what's called a two pound cut. So basically it's two pounds of shellac for every gallon of alcohol. So we're going to use a one pound bag with a half gal

lon of alcohol. We're going to use a coffee grinder to grind up the flakes. So it dissolves faster in the alcohol. We've done enough talking. Let's it's time to start making some stuff. What's this channel called Daniel? This big five gallon container is a little hard to pour, but I'm trying to be exact. And this stuff is extremely flammable. That should do it. We didn't make too much of a mess, a little bit of spillage, not much. 64 ounces. So we were just discussing that this ethanol has no od

or to it. And the denatured alcohol definitely has an odor to it. So whatever, whatever poisons they're adding to this is adding an odor. And so for our shellac flakes, we're going to grind this up so it dissolves faster. It goes right in there. We've got to do the whole bag. That was only, that was only part of the bag. So one pound of shellac flakes or 16 ounces of shellac flakes dissolving and 64 ounces of 99.9% ethanol. This is going to take about 24 hours for it to dissolve. Even though we

ran it through the coffee grinder, if we didn't run it through the coffee grinder, it could take many, many days. So it looks like it's mixed, but it's going to settle here shortly. And so every couple hours, I'm just going to do one of these numbers to make sure it's mixed. So we're going to come back tomorrow and finish up this formula. Shellac does have a shelf life. It does go bad. It's all natural. So I'm just putting a date on here. Just let me know. I'm going to use all this right away, b

ut if you're doing this, you probably want to label your stuff. The shellac flakes did not have an odor and the ethanol didn't have much of an odor. I can smell it now though, but it smells completely different than this stuff, the stuff in a can, just much stronger odor. I don't know if it's just because this is older than maybe this is like a year old, but complete different smell. Shellac flake comes in different colors. I am using super blonde for the least amount of color possible. So it'll

have a nice golden look. The shellac color comes from the sap that is in the tree that the shellac bug is living on. I have not experimented with the darker colors, but that's something you could definitely do. It is the next day. The shellac has dissolved nice and good. We are all set to go for our formula here. So I got a bunch of these bottles and I'm going to fill them up to 25 fluid ounces. I've done a bunch of tests with different ratios of boiled linseed oil and the shellac. I got just p

lain boiled linseed oil, just plain shellac, and then a bunch of different ratios. I found that 75% boiled linseed oil with 25% shellac gives me the results that I am looking for. This is totally by taste, but I'm getting just a tiny, tiny little bit of sheen and top surface coating with 25% shellac. I got a bunch of these bottles. That means we need 18 ounces of boiled linseed oil to six ounces of shellac. I poured my shellac in a smaller container, just to make it a little bit easier to pour a

nd be precise. Six ounces of shellac, 18 ounces of boiled linseed oil for 25 ounces of finish. It leaves a little bit of room in the top of the bottle. So we can shake it up and it smells good. And it smells good. I'm going to show you how to apply this at the end. Hang tight. Now we're going to work on part two of the finish. And that is the wax. The wax took me the longest and playing with the different ratios to find something that I liked. I came up with a ratio that I did like, but the citr

us solvent was so strong that my shop would smell like oranges for days. Like it sounds amazing at first, but it really got to me. So I had to reconfigure and kind of start from scratch. So the four ingredients for this is carnauba wax, beeswax, boiled linseed oil, and citrus solvent. All of these are pure natural. This is just orange peel oil. This is boiled linseed oil that we talked about earlier. We got beeswax and carnauba wax. The carnauba wax dries really hard and the beeswax dries really

soft. So when we combine the two, we can get the hardness that we're looking for. Add in the boiled linseed oil because the boiled linseed oil will cure add in that top layer. And then the citrus solvent helps everything break down. Everything here, totally edible, totally natural. The formula for this is one part carnauba wax, one part beeswax, four parts, boiled linseed oil, and two parts citrus oil. And we're going to melt everything together here in our kitchen. And for this we're measuring

by weight instead of volume. So we need a little scale for this. We're measuring by weight and we're going by parts. So it doesn't matter if you're using ounces, pounds, grams, doesn't matter. So I need an equal part carnauba wax and an equal part beeswax. So we're going to go two ounces of carnauba wax, two ounces of beeswax, and then eight ounces of boiled linseed oil. So the final ingredient to this is the citrus oil and I need four ounces by weight. This citrus oil smells so good. This is g

oing to take a few minutes for everything to melt and combine into one. Really, really important that your ethanol is nowhere near the heat source. That stuff is super flammable. That is all melted and mixed together now. And so that needs to sit for an hour or two to harden up. After cooling for a couple of hours, it has solidified and is ready to go. So while I'm applying the finish, I would like to tell you about today's sponsor and that is Squarespace. I have been using Squarespace for over

a decade. Why? Because Squarespace makes my life so much easier. It was time for me to redesign my website and it was so easy with Squarespace because all I had to do is just swap out some colors. I could drag and drop and move things around and I was good to go. That dragging and dropping and moving things around, that's all part of the fluid engine that makes Squarespace so easy to work with. So just recently I made 10 art skateboards to put them up for sale on my Squarespace site. If this was

like 2002 and I didn't have a CMS like Squarespace, it would have been, it would have taken me all day to update the website with 10 new products. With Squarespace it made it super easy, super convenient. I could duplicate pages. I could, it's copying and pasting and just dragging things around the way I want. Hmm. My merch, it's all print on demand through a company called Printful, which integrates seamlessly into my Squarespace site. Squarespace makes my life easier. It can make your life ea

sier as well. So visit squarespace.com and when you're ready to launch, visit squarespace.com/makesomething for 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. Thank you Squarespace for allowing me to experiment and come up with the perfect finish. So now I'm going to show you how I finished my projects. I sand everything down to 220. This might be overkill, but I like using paint prep rags because they are lint free. Fastest, easiest way is I just pour a little bit on the surface. Don't eve

n need gloves. You can wear gloves. You probably want to wear gloves, but you don't need to. And then I will take my lint free rag and just push it right into the wood. And I've got Walnut, Oak, Maple and Cherry here just to show what it looks like on the different species. And I'm just pushing this down into the grain. It's one of those things. If you take your time, a little goes a very long way. Although on some woods, like I can see the Cherry soaks up a lot more than the other species. So r

eally it's going to depend on what type of wood you're using after about 10 or 15 minutes. Time isn't critical, but after about 10 and 15 minutes, you want to come back with a clean rag and make sure there is nothing sitting on the surface and it is all rubbed into the wood. You don't want any pools of this oil on the surface. Why not just shellac or why not just boiled linseed oil? I like the way they work together. The boiled linseed oil goes into the grain and brings out the color of the wood

and it gives it a nice golden tone. Of course on Maple, it is going to yellow a little bit. Nearly all finishes are going to yellow Maple a little bit unless you get into the water based stuff. But I love the way boiled linseed oil just becomes part of the wood and brings out the beauty. The shellac is adds a little bit more protection because shellac is a resin. It'll dry hard. So it sits a little bit more on the surface while the oil goes down below the surface. And that is why those two work

so well together. Why other formulas like the Sama loop formula works so well because it's boiled linseed oil, mineral spirits, and polyurethane. That polyurethane adds protection. I didn't want to use polyurethane because it is not pure and natural. So that's why we're using the shellac and that is looking really good. I don't like my furniture shiny in very rare cases. Do I like my furniture to have a glossy finish? Very rare. So this is going to work out perfect. We can actually hone in the

shine that we want in the next step. So we're going to let this sit for 24 hours. We're going to come back to it and add our wax. It is the next day. Everything is dry. It lost a little bit of its sheen as the wood soaked up more of that finish. When I applied that finish, I recommended using the paint prep regs just because they're lint free and it makes it a nice, easy process. Not required, but recommended. To apply the wax, I am going to say it is a requirement to use the gray and white pads

. Typically I like to cut these into quarters. So I'm going to use the gray scotch brite pad, dip it right into my wax and just rub it right on. It's like we're sanding and putting that wax on at the same time. This is going to create a buttery smooth finish. Right now I'm going in a swirling motion. You can go with the grain against the grain. It doesn't matter. It's such a fine grit that it's going to come out flawless no matter what you do. I don't know if this shows up on camera, but you mig

ht see some swirls in there. That's totally fine. Let that be swirly and then just let that dry for 15 or 20 minutes. Might not even take that long, but we want that wax to set up. Now that it has had time to set for about 15 minutes or so, we're going to use the white scotch brite pad and go with the grain and buff this to the shine that we want. It's not glossy, it's not super dull. It's like right in between. It still looks and feels like wood. That's what I like about this finish is it doesn

't leave a plastic coating on the top. Everything still feels and looks like wood. I know I keep saying this, but this stuff smells so good. So we're just going to buff this into the wood and get that shine that we want. This doesn't take very long. It's just, just a few strokes if you know what I'm saying. A little bit of effort, but high quality work does take a little bit of effort. Look at that. That is the perfect sheen that I am looking for in a finish. And we were just discussing if you t

ook like a power buffer to this, you could get a much greater shine out of that. It's just not what I look for in my furniture. Now I have finished lots of furniture with just shellac and there is the fear of if you spill whiskey or any kind of liquor on a shellac that it will ruin the finish. I have spilled whiskey a number of times on my shaker table that's finished with shellac and it did not ruin the finish. I suppose if the whiskey sat on there long enough, it just because shellac will re-d

issolve into alcohol. Our shellac is actually below the wax surface. So you shouldn't have to worry about spilling alcohol on the table. And this wax not only gives it a nice feel, but it should also protect it from liquids. So you can see that is, that is not going to penetrate the wood, that wax is going to protect it and keep it from going in the wood grain. So this should just wipe right up. So just like the liquid part of the finish, the wax does take a little bit of time to dry. 24 hours l

ater, it still might be a little fingerprinting. That's just the way wax is. If you come back in 24 hours with another white pad and just give it a quick buff, you should be good to go. I've been using this finish on my last few projects. Most notably the stereo stand and that finish came out flawless. It looks phenomenal. It's got the perfect sheen. It's got the right amount of protection for the type of furniture that it is. If I were making a tabletop where people are going to be eating dinne

r off of, and it's just going to get a lot of wear and tear. I'm probably not going to go with a natural finish and I'm going to go with something a little bit more protective, like a polyurethane that builds up a film on top of the surface. 98% of what I do doesn't need that level of protection. For the next year, I'm only selling this to my Patreon members at cost because I need to gather feedback. I don't know if this is going to separate and go bad. If it sits on a shelf for a year, I don't

know if this is the right ratio to wax to the liquid part. I don't know if people are going to hate it. So my Patreon members get to experiment with me. I'm going to sell it to them only gather feedback and information and data over the next year. And if people do love it and they enjoy it and people want it, I will look for a way to get this manufactured. I don't know. We were discussing earlier. I don't know if there is a 100% safe, non-toxic, all natural finish that combines these ingredients

over on Patreon. I'm also going to break down the cost of each ingredient to let you know exactly how much it costs to make each individual bottle. I gave everybody the exact formula that I am using. So I encourage you to just make it yourself. I will probably wear gloves when I use this in the future, just because I don't want the waxiness on my hands. And when shellac dries, it's, it's sticky. It's, it's sticky on your hands. So don't, don't yell at me saying, why are you wearing gloves when

it's all natural and why are you talking in that voice? Don't talk to me in that voice. This is, this channel is all about having fun, experimenting, toying, tinkering. We're just here to have fun. Is it okay if we have some fun? All right. There'll be a link to my Patreon down below. As always be safe, have fun, stay passionate and make something. Will you just look at that? Look at it. It is a really, really nice finish.