I am equally cheap..but...
David Weaver
.I bought about $75 of pigments when experimenting with stains. It cost me as much to make varnish as waterlox would cost - it's more of a principles thing.
If I were making the same thing as you are, I would seal it with dewax shellac and spray with crosslink target (I have no ability to spray inside with solvents - divorce would follow - otherwise I would spray a whole lot more nitro lacquer).
In terms of the principles, i couldn't see what's making up the solids, so I thought $35 was pretty presumptuous for petroleum products and a drier. If 20% of the product or more is some kind of modified oils not disclosed because they're not hazardous, that makes some sense.
But $35 for a quart of finish is meaningless. If it's little different than a $15 can of finish, then it's principle.
The stop loss bags are the same - it's not a matter of dollars, it's a matter of effort. When my stain mix dried, I had set it aside for something in the future yet to be determined. It worked wonderfully, worked on a planed or scraped surface and looked the same on a sanded surface (literally - same darkness, same absorption, because the solids are so high and because of the size of the pigment).
The fact that the half can dried isn't a big deal. I'll spend $40 and make another quart of it. It's a paint to get the stuff, and if I had the foresight to put it in a bag, I wouldn't have to go to the trouble. I didn't.
As far as the comments about guitars and handles, I think you're in a contest, and I don't know who it's with. I literally made a bed for a 10 year old last year. It didn't have to be as nice, so it allowed experimenting. My daughter wanted it to be white, so I used cheap wood and treated it like bodywork.
I wouldn't think of putting waterlox on a guitar for a second, nor would I put it on my tools. If they have a gloss version, I wouldn't be averse to putting it on furniture. It solves a problem I don't have, though. WB finish over shellac has worked very well as long as it's got crosslinker in it to get reasonably hard. Even then, I prefer just the shellac.
I quite enjoyed cooking the varnish. I look forward to figuring out what amount of dryer will make it dry hard and clear like a nitro lacquer. It smells wonderful when you apply it. We have different objectives. You're in a contest of something that I'm not in. I'm looking to do things that are pleasing on a sensory level. Over lunch, I cut 5 plane irons and a paring chisel out of bar stock. I really liked it. There's a version of a guy in both cases who has told me it's a waste of time to do that (actually, you've implied that), and I've run into "the guy" who says you can't harden and temper steel well in a forge and it won't be any good unless you send it off. I can have five irons ready for tempering with about $1 of gas before that fellow can box his irons, get them to the mail and back and then get them out of the box later and check them. The cost doesn't matter that much - it'll feel like an obligation to the person doing all of that logistical stuff, though, and it'll be pleasant for me the whole time.
