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Hi everyone!

One of my theacher is a violon-maker, and like every violon-maker, he loves hand tools, ancestral methods and natural materials. This week he told me about a plant that the stem is abrasive. You open it, and let it dry between book pages. Once dried, you can use it as an abrasive paper, equivalent to a 400-500 grit. It leaves a smoother finish than a regular 400, cause it's not garnet or metallic particules. They (well, he) use it for final sanding of the wood before applying pigments and varnish. When he showed me the plant, I realize that I have a lot of them near my girlfriend's place. So I'll give it a try soon, and give you some news!

I don't know if it's a openly known practice but well, I share this with you. And if some of you already used it, please give some feedbacks!


In french, the plant is called ''prêle'', and google translate it as ''horsetail''.

During the summer, it looks like this...


And when the cold weather comes, it looks more like this... Well, here in Quebec



Francis

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Francis Richer, Montréal
Les Guitares F&M Guitars

Oops, here the second image.

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Francis Richer, Montréal
Les Guitares F&M Guitars

Tried it. We call it Mare's tail and yes, it's a very common plant. . . or should that be a weed. I found that it burnished the wood as opposed to 'sanding' it.

Equisetum - scouring rushes were used to scrub out pans in the olden days. The plant has silica (glass/sand) as part of its cellular structure if memory serves.

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"Building guitars looks hard, but it's actually much harder than it looks." Tom Buck

We have an Abrasive Plant in North Carolina. It's a bit larger than the ones above :
http://klingspor.com/KlgprWho.htm

Seriously.... Cat Tail stems can be used as a burnisher/polisher when turning.

It's edible too, more for survival than pleasure though depending on your taste buds

I seem to recall that the Japanese had used shark skin as an abrasive for wood working...reckon you would want to give the bugger a good feed before you took him out the aquarium though.

Cheers

Kim

I bet he shoots his own horses to make hide glue as well ...

No. He keeps the horses for the horsehair, to make his bows...

He shut down the cows for nut and sabble bone material.

For hide glue, he have a colony of rabbits and an aquarium of sturgeons.

No need to say that he climbs himself in trees to get resins and gums for the french polish.

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Francis Richer, Montréal
Les Guitares F&M Guitars

If you look back at my lute builds you'll see that I used shark skin, or shagreen, as my finishing abrasive. It was used extensively as an abrasive before 3M started up! Different species of shark and ray have skin which give different grades of abrasive.

Colin

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I don't believe in anything, I simply make use of a set of reasonable working hypotheses.

Anyone ever tried using cat tongue?

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"Preoccupation with an effect gives it power and enhances the error"
from "Your Owner's Manual" by Burt Hotchkiss.

I hope abrasives made from horsetail catches on. I have so much of that stuff growing around here that I could retire rich.

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George :-)

You'd have to turn the cat upside down and cats don't like upside down.