I have been reading a book by an English author on medieval and later English country life. In it, she makes reference to a shelf fungus that grows on birch trees and that was used as a strop for woodworking tools, razors, etc.
The fungus has apparently wandered around a bit taxonomically, but I found two articles that both reference this use, although they seem to differ on what part of the fungus is the relevant part:
Birch is not common around us - it appears we're not in the natural range of the various species - and I don't recall having seen this fungus. But it does sound interesting.
If you get excited by it, David, I'll look forward to the results of your research.
Interesting!! a mushroom called "razor strop". I have enough hanging strops to try it and see what it does (I'll see if I can locate someone who has dried it and put it in a bag on ebay or etsy).
'll bet not the one pictured. There is another and it can be larger than a dinner plate. As a kid in Adirondacks I would break them off and draw on the white undersurface with a sharp stick.
...trying to find real turpentine (which I did eventually get from a health food store, because people...wait for it..
...take a bath in it and drink it).
I didn't find the scientific name of that mushroom, but a search on ebay finds it to be popular in a tincture as well as in dried mushrooms for some kind of herbal remedy.
If only they knew I was using their keys to good health to make varnish and sharpen things. They'd probably call me a quack.
Turpentine baths used to well known and very widespread, their health effect is in the same ballpark as sauna or peloid baths — works for some, but not the others.
I remember messing with this fungus when I was a kid. It's has a layered structure, a layer could be ~1/4" thick. Layers could be carefully separated with a small wedge after harder outer skin is removed all around. Layers are easy to break, but not too fragile and they hold together. My granddad and me used to make small cardboard boxes and glue pieces of these layers all over — some (or maybe all? I don't remember) of these fungi were brown inside, so the final color and texture was like tanned leather. I had no idea about medicinal or stropping properties, but granddad told that when kids used to to all kinds of crafts from it he was young.
I think that any dense fungus would work as a strop with compound. Maybe it would worth a hassle when they're abundant locally, for me personally it's way easier to procure leather than this type of mushroom. But it's an interesting fact nonetheless.
...it probably kills things. I guess there's lots of things you could sit in that kill things (and turpentine is probably not that harmless compared to some of them)
I could make less sense of mixing it in drinks and eating it, but I remember seeing worse on network TV when I was a kid (including people who were involved in an intervention because they were "recycling their liquids" for health reasons. Sort of an attempt at an infinite loop so as "not to flush anything beneficial").
...on etsy. It was only about 10 bucks with shipping. I'm guessing after reading about how it works, though, that it's a strop when it's not dry.
Oh well! The turpentine was a lot more expensive, and I didn't learn anything about baths or ingesting, but I sure learned how slow varnish dries if it can't get adequate UV and doesn't have any drier in the mix.
and one of the guitars that I varnished is finally dry now, but not until it took on "canvas print" pattern on the back and front where the varnish moved at 10^-6 meters per hours until the print was in it (and in my wisdom last year, I made five telecasters so that I couldn't pay very close attention to what any one was doing).
I'm fairly sure as a kid I knocked on 100 of them in the woods only to skin knuckles. Never thought to inspect the stuff on the underside (let alone strop a razor on it).
In a similar "fungus" vein, although it has nothing to do with sharpening...
Lycopodium is the yellow spores of the club moss plant and is traditionally used as a pore filler for fine grain woods, like the spruce and maple used for violins.
Turpentine from hardware store is toxic, it's extracted from pulp and contains sulphates. The kind for baths and drinking you've bought online is made by distilling saps and essentially is a composition of essential oils and terpenes, they're safe in low concentration when ingested. Tastes awful probably.
Surprisingly, baths presumed to work because turpentine (and many other substances, e.g. menthol, apitoxin, mustard oil) irritate skin and act as a stimulant. Baths were prescribed to treat arthritis, radicular pains, gout, etc. 18-19th century literature, especially biographies, are full of mentions, people were going to special resorts trying to cure consumption, mental disorders and what not. I think baths stopped to be popular because there's mixed evidence of their effect, but they're still a thing in many parts of Europe.
I am skeptical there is any difference in the chemical composition of the two materials called turpentine in your post. What is the source of your information?
I can't vouch for so every maker, but the first batch of turpentine that I got from a health food store and the second that I got from Portugal as pure are drastically different smelling than the stuff that comes as pure gum spirits turpentine from a kleen strip can.
It wasn't ungodly expensive from Portugal but it's unbelievably expensive from health food places. If I were going to even consider ingesting it, I'd have posted a question for you, though.
When I looked up the razor strop mushroom, it was apparently eaten to expel parasites.
One of the things speculated about the parasite, though, is that part of the issue of inflammation, especially intestinally is hypothesized to be due to a lack of parasites in a hygienic society, and that the parasite that razor strop shrooms expel is being introduced to people with autoimmune disorders with some positive effect (sort of the border collie principle? I don't know).
"Give it something to do or it will cause trouble looking for something to do".
Ok, is should've just read first. Apparently parasites , or some of them, release something or elicit modulation of immune systems to avoid being attacked. It's more complicated than my crackpot border collie theory.
But the intentional ingestion of parasites to do that is the subject of clinical trials, not just antiestablishment nonsense.
Turpentine is a more or less refined liquid component of pine sap. Some of the dozens of components have exceptional low odor thresholds, which means it doesn't take much of them (hundredths or even thousandths of a per cent) to detect their presence or absence. The more or less and "pine" suggest important variables that are going to affect odor.
I would be surprised if any of these variables have any noticeable effect on using this stuff as a solvent. It will take changing a composition 20%+/- to change a solvent property. These variables could have a noticeable effect on smell and/or how happy a body might be ingesting or bathing.
the ingesting or not is off of my radar - I thought it was interesting.
I'm more interested in two things:
1) making varnish
2) cleaning things with turpentine
The violin varnish makers suggest spending the money on the stuff that I spent the money on for varnish making.
I can't see spending the same ($20-$40 a pint) for cleaning, though (I can't remember what the home depot stuff costs, but it wasn't much more than anything else in quarts).
The varnish that I've made is pleasant to apply and smell (haven't followed up on introducing driers, which would help in making it pleasant to use in general).
So the whole health part is off of my radar other than having to buy the first jar of turpentine that I got form a health food supplier (before finding a seller form portugal who sells the same thing for half as much without a label that says you can eat it and bathe in it -something I'm not going to do).
(I am not a chemist and have no idea what the difference is between these two - presumably the top bits exist in turpentine and it's cheaper to mix them with the bottom?).
The purer types are listed as 100% gumspirits.
The former is $7 a quart, though. I'm suspicious about reported failed batches of varnish but as long as it takes to make it and as little as I've used, I'm not willing to take risks.
These links describe a family of substances. CDC website ( https://www.cdc.gov/niosh/npg/npgd0648.html) also gives just an approximate formula for a hydrocarbon, which implies that actual composition is a combination of complex hydrocarbons — which it is. There's also a number of sources explaining turpentine manufacture, Wikipedia describes three ways of manufacturing, last one is condensing of sulfate turpentine produced from pulp - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turpentine#Converting_oleoresin_to_turpentine. I don't think that whatever is sold in a hardware store was converted from sulphate terpentine, and even if it was — there are more than just trace amounts of sulphates in it.
One thing that I was wrong about is toxicity of pure turpenes that were produced by distilling oleoresins. They're toxic too, it's just concentrations it was consumed with were low enough and did not result in noticeable short term effects. I would realize it if I'd just give it a thought.
The first one is actually a terpene, a specific kind. This long record allows a chemist to figure particular properties of this particular kind, or at least find in in a catalog. The second one doesn't make a lot of sense, it says that turpentine contains turpentine. Maybe when they analyze final product they found that primary component is alpha-pinene and it's concentration is 70%, and that other 30% are made up from hundreds of other compounds that vary from batch to batch.
as I'm not a chemist, I checked out the two CAS numbers. since I'm not a chemist, I really have no clue what I'm reading even when I'm reading it, but I gathered that the top is more specific than the bottom (or part of the bottom) and more widely available.
Of course, I have no idea what I'm reading and that's just a guess.
I've sniffed them both (not huffed, but sniffed!). The two 100% gum spirits terps that I've gotten have a wonderful smell. It's lovely even in the varnish. The kleen-strip version smells faintly like this but more "oily" in the sense that we think of things being petroleum smelling, but it doesn't exactly smell like a petroleum product. It's just not as crisp and is a bit more rank.
I can be goaded into a lot of things, but I'm refusing at this point to make two batches of varnish at the same time to prove that the cheap one makes a varnish that works fine but doesn't smell quite as good!
It is the volatile, more or less refined, component of pine sap. It can be extracted from stumps, recovered from slits on a tree or recovered from the Kraft pulping process which separates the sap from the cellulose and lignin. It may be more or less refined after this recovery step to make the product for sale as "Turpentine". Depending on the recovery step and the refining, the minor components will vary but the major components will be the same, but possibly in different ratios. These minor components might affect smell and color but not the solvent properties. They may also affect critical uses like pharmaceutical. Possibly they may affect critical varnish applications. They could become polymerized into the varnish. Some are not very volatile and they could take forever to leave the applied film. I made some Carnauba wax formulation by dissolving the wax in turpentine and the wax never dried. Smelled nice though.
"Sulfate Turpentine" describes the process that extracted the turpentine to yield the same turpentine as the other methods of recovering it. Again, minor components will differ. It does not contain "sulfate". In its unrefined state this product likely would not smell desirable but the stinky trace components would be easily refined away.
Tank cars of this stuff are produced a day. Most is burned to make steam for pulping. I don't know if it is easier to refine this cheap source of raw turpentine to be rid of the stinky stuff to yield something that can be sold for paint solvent, or, start with slashed trees or stumps. I doubt there are many pine stumps left to recover. I don't know but I would suspect that most all the turpentine sold is recovered from Kraft pulping.
would something as simple as mixing wax with both of my types of turpentine and seeing which dries faster be a reliable indicator of varnish drying, or does the high temperature cook (polymerization?) make that not comparable to a post cook varnish?
