I got a 25 kg. block of Ausons' navy pitch. It is a mixture of pine pitch and bitumen, used to seal caulking on wooden ships decks. I froze it and broke it into pieces with a hammer. Anyone wanting to try some, I have more than I can use? I will send a few pounds to Roy N., as he sent me some Rauch navy pitch which was lost in the mail when I sent it back.I plan on mixing it with rosin and a bit of lanolin. Will have to experiment to get the proportions right. Anyone using this product? My uncle used to keep his fresh made Holt's black wax in a jar of water to keep it from drying out, or it would go brittle really fast. After using it, back into the jar it went.

Ted,

I would love to try some. I am having a hard time finding pitch.

Geri

Email me if you want some.

Forum rules state very explicitly that no prices may be quoted if they pertain to items you are selling.

Admin

(Message edited by admin on November 24, 2010)

I finally made some coad and I was surprised at how well it turned out. I used 1 part bess wax, 1 part brewers pitch and 1 part bullriders rosen.

It looks pretty good although I am not sure how brewers pitch differs from rosin.

Tight Stitches
DWFII--HCC Member

DW,

Darn it! You might be right....again.

Yesterday it was nice and sticky while working it but this morning it is only slightly sticky and rather brittle. The rosin was in a powdered form and the brewers pitch was in chunks and more sticky out of the package. I had such a hard time locating "PITCH" so I decided to try the brewers pitch that was purchased to line a leather bottle with. I should have maybe just used the brewers pitch and the beeswax 1:1 in the absence of the pitch?

Can I just remelt this and add more bees wax to bring it back to sticky?

It actually coated the linen threads great though. And the house is cold this morning so might that also be part of the reason that the coad is currently as hard as a rock? lol

Geri

Geraldine,

If the "brewers' pitch" was the stuff for lining drinking vessels, it's a petro-chemical base, non-toxic, and not even vaguely related chemically to pine trees like the stuff you want.

Try some "Real Stuff" brand thick Swedish tar, mix with pine rosin to make chunks of pitch, then add more rosin, etc. to taste for hand-wax.

Geri,

Well, I was afraid of that. I don't know that adding more bees wax would help except in the initial stages. I don't know that it wouldn't either. But, in my experience, the rosin/brewers pitch will always tend separate itself from the bees wax and flake off the threads. If not while using it, then a little while later. I have seen inseams and inseam threads that looked and worked terrific initially but a week down the road it was bare thread and powdered rosin.

Making hand wax is really a tricky business as much because getting the proper ingredients is so difficult these days. Originally, if my sources are correct, Sperm Whale Oil was preferred as a softener. Whale oil is itself really a liquid wax.

Of course, no whale oil is available today but jojoba oil is almost identical at the molecular level--and it's also a liquid wax. I haven't tried it but I can't see why it wouldn't be fine. I think I'd try that before adding more bees wax. (It's also good for your skin and making homemade cosmetics)

Also, according to my sources and experience, non-pharm(non USP) cod liver oil will tend to "jelly-up" with exposure to air and oxidation. Theoretically that will hold the wax together and on the threads.

Tight Stitches
DWFII--HCC Member

Thanks for the advice.

I did find the "Real Stuff" at
http://www.tarsmell.com/tar.html

I will give it a try.

So let me just clarify this.

The brewers pitch should not be used being a petro chemical product.
But I can use the bullriders rosin and the beeswax. Does that sound correct?

Geri

Al and DW,

I called JAS Townsend & Co. where I purchased the brewers pitch. Although they label it as "pine tar" , they told me that it is a mixture of petroleum wax and rosin.

So now I have "The real stuff" Stockholm tar ordered and I will use the bullriders rosin and bees wax.

So what is the difference between the rosin and the stockholm tar? except that one is a semiliquid and one is a chunky powder?

geri

DW, Al, Geraldine
We use Stockholm Tar for vet work with horses. I never made the link between that and 'pitch' but here is a link to a safety spec sheet for Stockholm tar

http://www.josephlyddy.com.au/upload/Stockholm_Tar_SDS.pdf

If you 'Wiki' Stockholm tar you get a different story ie how useful it is and how it's been used to treat skin conditions etc in humans...

Slightly confused
Tom.

You can turn Stockholm Tar into pretty good usable pitch if you've got somewhere with low fire risk and really good ventilation by pouring it into a pot and heating it until the smoke goes really dark brown/black. That'll drive off the lighter volatiles and you'll get a more solid pitch at the end.

Beware though that the smoke will condense out as brown tarry goo on anything it touches. Trust me, I know [img]http://www.thehcc.org/forum/images/old_smilies/sad.gif"%20ALT="sad[/img]

Geri,

Stockholm tar is a black viscous liquid made from the destructive distillation of tree roots. Rosin is processed sap. The only real similarity is that they both come from trees Pitch is a black solid that is the product of further distillation of tar. If it ain't black, it ain't pitch, regardless of what the seller calls it. If the seller calls it 'pitch' and it's an orange or brown solid, chances are it's rosin, or some petrochemical analogue thereof.

Rosin makes good hand wax in combination with beeswax and a /i{tiny} bit of oil if necessary. I use tallow. I'm working towards a medieval / renaissance 'coad' so I'm chasing methods that don't require beeswax at all.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tar
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pitch_(resin)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosin

IIRC, the old Rausch Naval Yards pitch was really just a combination of something very like, or identical to, Stockholm Tar and pine rosin.

So...theoretically a serviceable hand wax ought to be able to be made from Stockholm tar and perhaps double, or slightly less, the amount of pine rosin that you would need if using a bona fide Swedish Pitch. And of course the whale, cod, or jojoba oil.

Someone correct me if they have tried this and found it wanting.

YMMV

Tight Stitches
DWFII--HCC Member

All,
Swedish tar is nothing that is used in the old recepie for shoemakers wax. Old Swedish tar is a liquid almost transparent fluid. What is used for wax is the heavy left over which is called pitch and is black. But when heated it turns into a lighter "black" coulour and if mixed with 50% collofonium (which Ithink would be rosin) the wax will be black but when put on the linnen yarn it turns into the "bronze colour so much loved by shoemakers) this has always been my way of making shoemakers wax and dependending on the
temprature just add bee wax to get it soft enough. This works good as a starter, hope this helps.

However, the Swedish pitch of today day is to brittle because they burn it to hot to get as much tar out of it. We where talking last year about a guy who could perhaps make something for us but he never get intouch again and I am afraid he had some problem with sicknes.

Janne

Alasdair,
When the tar is getting black then it is not of good quallity it is to much dirt in it. The first litres of the good stuff is almost transparent, it is like a virgin oil. And you are right, I use sheep tallow in my recpie, which by the way is a fat that never rotten. I am still using a piece that is probaly 7-8 years old and has never changed in smell or form! But since it could be hard to find it in a none sheep country like Sweden bee wax works too.

Janne

(Message edited by janne melkersson on March 28, 2011)

Geri,

The only 'brewers' pitch" I've known over the past 38 years has been used extensively by reenactors/sutlers for lining leather drinking vessels, etc. It used to be made by Mangel, Shuremann & Outers, in Philadelphia for lining industrial ice cream and beer vats, so they would not pick up or cross-flavor their contents. It was a jet black, low melting-point petro-chemical coating in two grades, one for non-porous surfaces like steel vats, or porous surfaces, like wood vats and leather. Colonial Williamsburg used it exclusively from c.1960s through '90 for lining leather mugs, fire buckets, and leather water bottles, etc. G. Gedney Godwin used it, as well as Jas. Townsend & Sons until, it went OP in the late 1980s-early 1990s.

Maybe there are old stock piles of it left, or a new substitute has been found, but whichever, "brewers' pitch" was "pitch" in name only, and possessed none of the ductility, stickiness, anti-microbial qualities, or smell of the "pine pitch" we need to make proper hand-wax--it ain't going to give you the results you want.

If "bullriders' " rosin is 100% PINE rosin, like you rosin fiddle bows with, it ought to work ok. "Beeswax" ditto, if 100% pure, but a lot of beeswax is beeswax "compound" these days--it's been cut with other stuff. Stay with 100% pure and you should be fine.

Since DW brought up adding oils here: I have never heard of sperm whale oil being added to shoemakers' wax, but why not try it. A few drops of "sweet oil" (olive oil), or pure neat's-foot oil (not "compound"], yes, but these can ruin a batch of wax fast--safer to experiment with beeswax IMO.

Geri,

Rosin is a brittle glass-like residue left over from distilling turpentine by cooking down pine trees.

Stockholm tar is rawer, un-processed by-product of same operation as far as I know. Both are chemically "related", just different levels of refinement.

"Pitch" is a recombination of the semi-liquid pine tar with the pine rosin, made originally to caulk wooden ships. It was formulated in varying softnesses/hardness for sailing in colder/hotter climates--harder for tropical waters, softer for colder regions so it wouldn't crack or melt and ooze out of the crevices it was applied to.

D.A.
I am not sure we are talking about the same thing. Here in Sweden it is tar that is used to prevent wood from rotten.

"Pitch" was long time gone the valuable stuff that was left at the bottom of the bucket when they burned the wood. And if I'm not misstaken tar was the fluid liquid above it. These two products was for a period of 600 years Sweden most exported products until they started to make tar petrochemical around 1890.

Here's some photos of how they did it in the old days http://www.kolarbyn.com/tjardal.html

So guys, what about chasers pitch? It seems available. Does anyone know if it has the properties we need for stitching wax?

And is there a difference between pine and birch pitch?

Then what is the "colophony" selling at L. Cornelissen & Son in London? Is it rosin?

colophony according to Wikipedia is ROSIN

I've worked with the bullriders rosin before while making homemade varnish for wood (archery) bows. Saddle-Bronc and bareback riders use it too, so you could call it "rodeo rosin". As far as I could tell, it was 100% pure. At least the batch I got anyway.

Would be fun to harvest some straight from the woods. I've seen tree stumps covered with rosin and there would be no doubt that it's pure.
Think I'll leave the bees wax harvesting to the professionals!

Cheers,
-Nat

If you pour out some pine tar on a piece of glass you can see that it is transparent. Pitch is boiled down pine tar:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pine_tar
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pitch_%28resin%29

Here is where I get my rosin:

http://shop.chemicalstore.com/navigation/detail.asp?id=BROSIN

Raw, filtered beeswax is available from lots of places including eBay.

Bill

Has anyone tried surfboard wax?

-Nat