Fixor: part deux, finis!

I have a large project ahead of me so I started picking things up and putting them away.  Don't know why, except it always makes me feel better about the world.  And myself.

In the midst of that I found a bag of shellac which I've had for several months, since I made some blocking powder (which I will post about shortly).  Shellac comes as flakes but those flakes turn into a block if they sit around too long. This bag had four or five blocks the size of marbles and about the same volume of flakes.  I needed to do something with it.

So I decided to make more of the fake Fixor glaire, used in gold tooling as described in the previous blog entry.

The beauty of fixor, or other shellac glaires, is that they pretty much last forever.  So I decided to use the whole 100 g. bag and be done with it.  The shellac was light yellow in color, bleached and unwaxed.  Peter Geraty (who steered me to this recipe) wrote that generally orange was the best shellac to use but that he didn't know if that applied to our purpose.

The recipe is this (Wehlte p. 217):

10g. borax  /  200 cc  water  /  30 g. bleached shellac
Disolve the borax in hot water.  Sprinkle in the shellac.  Do not boil.

Having 100 g of shellac I obviously increased all the quantities so that I could use the whole bag.  I took out my least favorite tool in my bindery, the hot plate, and went at it using my glass pyrex pan since I didn't know whether it was best to avoid metals when making this stuff (like one should do in making paste or methyl cellulose).

I kept the hot plate at half temperature (I think the hot plate that burned down the building I had just moved out of was probably set higher than that, but the fear remains!) and dissolved the borax instantly.  The shellac took probably 20 minutes of stirring to get it all dissolved.  I wondered what would have happened if I pulverized them in my coffee grinder (which I don't use for coffee, by the way) but I also wondered how long it would take to dissolve the marble sized pieces.  Seemed more therapeutic to stir and stir and stir.....

It came out this color:

Here is a picture of Fixor, which has been diluted 1:3 (Fixor : water) to its usable consistency:

I'd say it looks quite similar.  Obviously using a different colored shellac would result in a different color.  Again this was light yellow shellac.

But all that matters is whether it works.  I took a calf skin which I had dyed for tests on this.  In the right section I applied Fixor, in the middle of this image I flooded the space with this homemade fixor (I can't capitalize fixor if it's not the brand name Fixor, can I?  Too bad I'm not married to an editor.  Wait!  I am!)  The left section of this picture is two lighter coats of this homemade solution applied more carefully.  By this I mean that I used a cotton ball to spread the solutions over the whole part of the skin, not just in the impressions.

The surface of the leather after this application of Fixor and fixor didn't show much of a difference between them.

Looking closely at them anyone would have a hard time telling the difference between them, or deciding which was better to use.  These were all just a one strike impression, going back in would make them all more consistent and better.  If any section was worse than the other two it was the flooded section, which one wouldn't do anyway except to mess about.

A big, big thanks needs to go to Peter Geraty for pointing the way in this.  It's much appreciated.

Fixor problem

Several friends have been using Fixor for their gold tooling.  (Basically it's a glaire used to adhere the gold to the leather).  Fixor comes as a liquid that is then diluted in water, generally 1 Fixor in 3 water.

For the most part I have used BS glaire from Hewit, but thought I'd give Fixor a shot more out of curiosity than anything else.

I ordered it expecting it to be this:

Can't really tell from a static picture, but it's a liquid.  If you shake your computer you probably can see it swirl around the bottle.  (I got my hands on this bottle in the midst of this episode, which means I have enough Fixor to last me a long, long time and this whole episode is really about solving the puzzle more than meeting a great need.)

Instead I received this.  I started calling this gel Fixor. 

I asked Talas about it and was told that was how Fixor came to them.  Then I put the question out via email and online and no one had ever seen Fixor like this before and had no idea how to use it.  Most had bought the liquid Fixor from Talas but had never seen the gel.

Talas, who were trying to be helpful throughout all this by the way, contacted Relma who said it was normal and that "we recommend to dilute the Fixor with 25/30% water proportion, it will be enough."

And it would make sense to ship Fixor overseas in a more concentrated form, so I thought that answered the "why?" part of the question.  That left the "how?" to be figured out.

So I portioned out some of this Fixor in water and placed them in jars in differing concentrations.  For several days I shook them every hour or so.  They never diluted and after three weeks they still look like this:

I wasn't about to ruin a blender to get this suspended in the water so began to consider whether it wasn't supposed to be cooked.  

When the listserv discussion was going on Peter Geraty posted that he had figured out that Fixor was basically saponified shellac and gave a recipe from Kurt Wehlte's book "The Materials & Techniques of Painting."  The recipe is on page 217.  I made it and it works well which would have solved the Fixor problem, but I am still have been bothered by this blob of Fixor I paid for, was stuck with and wanted to make useful.

One key to the saponified shellac recipe is to heat the water and then add the shellac, but never letting the water boil.  So I wondered what would happen if I tried this with the gel Fixor.  It did do better at dissolving the Fixor but when I strained it after cooking and stirring it for several minutes a surprisingly large amount of solids remained.  And the resultant solution was much lighter in color than the diluted liquid Fixor.

In fact, and I'm not sure you can see it in this picture (it's hard to photograph liquids using an automatic focus camera) there is still quite a bit of solids in the liquid even after straining, which I've had to remove from the impressions when using it.  It is also much cloudier than Fixor diluted from the liquid.:

Did it work as a glaire?  I'd say yes, but it wouldn't be my choice.  In fact if all they had was the gel Fixor at Talas I'd get something else.  Unless someone could figure out how to dilute it.

Part of me wonders if I'm not missing something here and I sort of hope someone has cracked the mystery of dissolving blobs of Fixor.  The obvious answer is to buy Fixor in a liquid state, which probably means getting it from someone other than Talas.

Comments appreciated.

 A follow up post is here.