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Hello friends
i get shellac flakes with wax in my locality.
can we dewax the shellac in our workshop?
is there any procedure?

also our laws dont allow 100% pure alcohol
it is mixed with water about 40-50 %
can we use this alcohol to dissolve the shellac and
go ahead for french polishing?

Alcohol for shellac should be 95% alcohol. Anything less and the shellac will not dissolve properly. If you can't get ethyl alcohol, then you should be able to get denatured alcohol.
As far as dewaxing is concerned, after the shellac is fully dissolved, let it sit for a few days and you will see a sediment form on the bottom. Decant the shellac off this layer and you will have dewaxed shellac.

Sometimes it takes a lot longer than 3 days though. I prefer the tea bag method.

Can your please elaborate on that? That's a new one to me.

put the shellac in a cloth sack, or t-shirt material wrapped around it and tied at the top with a string. Hang it in the alcohol at the top of the liquid, but fully submerged. Let the shellac dissolve through the shirt material. This way, the heavier dissolved shellac works to the bottom of the jar and the clear alcohol rises to mix with the rest of the shellac. The wax and any impurities stay in the bag.

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Waddy

Photobucket Build Album Library

Sound Clips of most of my guitars

Thank you, Waddy. That's good to know.

I dissolve flakes in Everclear (95% ethanol) similar to Waddy only instead of T-shirt material I just dump the flakes into the foot cut off of a pair of my wife's panty hose and suspend it in a jar of the alcohol. (I always use my wife's, as mine are much too nice to use for this, and someone else's wife's would create more problems than it's worth.) You do need to run the resulting shellac through a paper coffee filter to eliminate the wax, but I also did that when I used cloth for the "teabag".

Is there any advantage to buying "natural" shellac and dewaxing it yourself versus just buying dewaxed shellac? My only experience is with the dewaxed stuff.

It might be less susceptible to oxidation, which would make it last longer,

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Waddy

Photobucket Build Album Library

Sound Clips of most of my guitars

I think it's a lot less susceptible to oxidation. I've had waxy Button shellac sitting in a drawer for near 15 years and it still dissolves easily. I had some seedlac given to me that is 25 years old and it works perfectly well.
The beauty of the tea bag method is that you can place the whole lot in a jar and forget about it for a day or so. It looks after itself. If I want a strongly coloured finish I'll place the shellac, dye twigs, madder etc all into the tea bag and come back to it a few days later. Suspend it and let it drain for an hour or so.

this sounds like an interesting process, something I want to experiment with. What is a dye stick? Could you share any "recipes" with us? What substances can you put into the shellac?

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We are all in the gutter but some of us are looking at guitars.

I really mean 'dye woods' - they just look a little like twigs. These are the natural dyes. I've tried madder powder, Alkanet, Brazilwood and Sandalwood - all in with garnet Shellac:

12g Garnet Shellac
5g Pale Shellac
4g Sandalwood chips
2g Brazilwood chips
3g Alkanet root
2g Madder Powder

That's the proportions that I used. Seems to work, although it was just a complete guess on my behalf. Just experiment. There are other dyes and of course you don't have to incorporate as many as I have. It's cooking. Always do test pieces by leaving half of a sample in a window for a few months, leave the other half in a drawer without light.

In application you just have to be careful that you aren't building the colour too fast, otherwise it can all get very patchy. I'm brushing the stuff on.
More modern Aniline dyes are less fugitive but tend to be very strong colours. Again you may have to mix them to achieve the desired colour.




The result, although in reality it looks darker and a touch more reddish than it displays on my computer screen:

Friends
thanks for the help
really the topic was so interesting so it catched all of ur attention
from now i will do the teabag method and let u know the results
till then
can u tell me the ratio of shellac to alcohol?
how many grams of shellac to how much ml of alcohol?

Michael, good to see that the masters WILL share their recipes. It's a very intersting subject. i've started doing a web search and can see there are many natural substances that colour shellac. I'm going to experiment. Thanks.

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We are all in the gutter but some of us are looking at guitars.

problem is that we have here alcohol with 50 by volume
and in denatured alcohol some amount of seedlac is added.

How strong is the denatured stuff you can get. I wouldn't worry about a small ammount of seedlac in my alcholol if I was mixing shellac. . .

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Bryan Bear PMoMC

Take care of your feet, and your feet will take care of you.

I may have missed something - apologies if I did, but is there an advantage to using the natural wood / plant materials to tint shellac rather than the commonly used dyes like Trans Tints?

you wanna hear something amusing, i tried adding paprika powder to my shellac to get it a deeper reddish orange color....it actually worked(a bit), but i ended up with little red sprinkles in the finish, from the bigger chunks i guess. i should have let it sit awhile and strained it. worth another shot
so now my cello has some paprika flavoring sprinkled on a repaired area...tasty!

No real advantage. Use whatever gets the job done, providing you like the colour. The Aniline dyes that I have are on the strong, vibrant side, therefore I find it easier to obtain a subtle colour with the natural dyes. I'm sure folk who dye cloth will tell you that you can't replicate the colour of natural dyes by using modern alternatives. Then again this isn't cloth. The advantage with aniline dyes is that they aren't as opaque as some of the natural dyes.

Paprika? Worth a shot. Tea and Turmeric have been used.

Makes sense. Thanks Michael.

Beautiful guitar, by the way.