[TheForge] Re: Finishes for food contact items

[Mike Spencer]

> To me Beeswax mixtures (with no chemical dryers) do dry at room
> temperature but very slowly.  We have use on our timber frame home a
> material called Land Ark.  It is made of beeswax, tung oil, linseed
> oil, and citrus extract.

Ah, "mixture".  Tung and linseed oils are, in the conventional
terminology, drying oils.  They have, relative to other common oils, a
high iodine number and, as Bruce says, a high degree of
"unsaturation". i.e. they have multiple double bonds between carbon
atoms.  It's those double bonds that are responsible for the oxidative
(exposed to air) or catalyzed (cobalt or other dryer added)
polymerization usually referred to as "drying".  The more of them and
(IIRC) the closer they are to each other, the better "drying".

Beeswax itself doesn't do the chemical thing that "drying" usually
refers to. If it did, your block of beeswax, stored for a year, would
have a skin of polymerized stuff on it, just as an open can of linseed
oil forms a skin on the surface during long storage.  Google for
"iodine number" for more chemical details.

I use carnauba wax, raw linseed oil or a mixture of them plus gentle
heat on cookware and utensils.  Once the buyer has it, olive oil
(somewhat drying) or, for that matter, just plain ol' hamburger grease
or pork fat (non-drying) will keep the rust off indoors.  The user,
after all, doesn't expect an item in h{is,er} kitchen to look shiny
and new.  Just has to look that way in the store or in your display.


- Mike

-- 
Michael Spencer                  Nova Scotia, Canada       .~. 
                                                           /V\ 
mspencer at tallships.ca                                     /( )\
http://home.tallships.ca/mspencer/                        ^^-^^