Hand Wax / Coad

[nickb1]

PS there is also a cheaper source here, if it ships to US: https://hyperdrug.co.uk/gold-label-stoc ... gJSaPD_BwE

So I tried this and thought I should record the results here for posterity. Starting with 2:1 tar:rosin (by weight, always) I slowly melted rosin into the tar, outdoors, away from residential buildings etc. Peanut butter (crunchy) on hand to clean up with, a tip from a woodworker, works a treat. I added more rosin to get to a pitch like consistency, meaning ductile when warmed but brittle at room temperature such that it will shatter, but still slump around over hours like the viscous liquid that pitch actually is. I tested for this by dropping some into a bucket of cold water then working it in the hand to assess its properties. At around 1:4.5 tar:rosin it seemed about right. The "recombinant pitch" was then poured into silicone cooking forms to cool. These work well.

I then used a recipe for threadwax, namely 2:1:0.33 pitch:rosin:beeswax that I think is stated in one of the posts in the Colloquy, making the wax in the usual way, grabbing the mixture just after pouring it into cold water, pulling it apart and reforming it several time before taffy pulling smaller sections and forming them into balls. @das states there seems to be too much beeswax as the wax is no longer dark (it should be a kind of dark amber, which it was until I taffy pulled it). I gave a lump to a west end shoemaker in London who likes it for welting. However I doubt it is quite sticky enough to mount bristles with at all easily; he uses coal tar for that, as I have been doing. So next time I will start with 3:1:0.15 pitch:rosin:beeswax. I will also have some scales, which I had forgotten, so these ratios are very approximate.

It's a fun process, smells nice and you get a useable wax. Can only get better The pics of the silicone ball show the pitch slumping around over many hours (around 8 if I recall correctly) at room temperature (actually a bit warmer, as they were left in a sunny spot).

coad1.jpg

pitch1.jpg

pitch2.jpg

pitch3.jpg

waxes.JPG

[das]

Test

[kemitchell]

Promising Sources

After much research, no little of it here in this huge forum thread, I was feeling at a loss for a source of usable pitch, whatever "pitch" needs to mean to stick and seal inseaming threads. Then, predictably, the capricious search-engine goblins decided it was better to keep stringing me along than let me down too hard, and I wound up finding a whole raft of online web stores offering rosin-beeswax-pitch blends, specifically marketed for hemp sewing, at reasonable prices, in stock to ship throughout the USA.

The magic search keywords? "cobbler's black wax". Behold: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=cobbler%27s+black+wax

Bagpipe players, for hemp cords. Fly tiers, for silk. It's even being sold in kits with little patches of leather to apply and store!

I have a few pucks on order from this page: https://www.hendersongroupltd.com/produ ... black-wax/ I'll be very curious to see how they work. I'll also be e-mailing that seller for any more information. A number of bagpipe suppliers seem to list the same item.

As for the fly-tying sites, I was able to trace back SKUs to at least one UK-based manufacturer: https://www.semperfli.net/bwax000blk.html Heck, they'll even do it shaped like a skull: https://www.semperfli.net/bwax001blk.html Memento mori for your fly-tying bench, perhaps? More importantly, both pages mention they manufacture in-house. But no mention of "pitch" or other ingredients by name. I have e-mailed them. I wouldn't expect to get a Betty Crocker recipe back, but I'd like to find out if there's tree pitch or bitumen involved.

Other fly-tying sites mention a possible US supplier, which I gather might be a one-man, small-business operation. The trading name is "Gunpowder Custom Tackle", for example: https://eflytyer.com/product/gunpowder- ... white-wax/ That listing has not just "cobbler black", but also summer and winter variations—a promising a sign. A Facebook page puts them in Grand Junction, Colorado. I've sent an e-mail their way, too.

An Aside

Fly-tying and bagpipers. I never met D.W. in person, but I think he might have enjoyed that.

By the by, I was able to e-mail Randee, D.W.'s widow, and order a copy of one of his books this week. Feel free to reach out to me privately for her e-mail address, if you don't already have it. Pricing to me was $150 for Western Bootmaking or Western Packers on CD, somewhat more for the book on Wellingtons. Payment was by check or PayPal. I told her not to sweat it, but she mailed my CD really quick. It came with a PDF, no password or DRM or other shenanigans, as well as a "goodies" folder of WMV videos of thread making and some other steps. She also offered to hop on the phone if I wanted to talk about such tools as she has left.

On "Pitch"

I have learned a very important lesson about the true meaning of this term: there isn't one. No two dictionaries, encyclopedias, or historical sources, much less suppliers, can be relied upon to use or define the term consistently. It's not one of those kinds of words.

Assuming there ever was any reliable meaning, my best guess for the "pitch" that aligns with the old sources describing "hand wax" or "coad" was essentially concentrated wood tar. In the United States, this was mostly from pine of the southeastern states, extracted by stacking fallen logs and stumps, surrounding with earth, and lighting a fire on top, essentially kiln heating to drip the resin off from the fiber. This "tar" would then be boiled or burned off, concentrating to "pitch".

This was all from a different production "pipeline" than that on live, standing pine trees, whose bark was gouged, causing resin to come to the surface and fall into mounted buckets. Distilling this excreted resin yielded turpentine, the liquid, and rosin, the solids.

Tapping trees en masse is no easy job, but distillation is a pretty well understood industrial process, not least in the southeastern US of A. On the other hand, I gather kiln drying resinous timber remains a pretty dirty, noxious job. I suspect anyone who's opened a pine tar can would agree. So that process, the tar-and-pitch part of the "naval stores" industry, really isn't going anymore, domestically. With bitumen from oil, we don't really need it. And the word "pitch" starts to wander toward meaning what we do have.

If "viscoelastic polymers" are the game, I can't stop wondering why we don't just tap beads of silicone onto threads and pull them home. Especially pulling nylon or polyester to begin with.

[das]

Welcome to the rabbit hole we're all facing regarding pine pitch, now that it's out of production. The last reliable source in the USA was Rausch Naval Stores in New Orleans--wiped-out in hurricane Katrina, never to rebuild. The last source in Europe I used was White Sea & Baltic Co., Leeds, UK. They now(?) only supply "Stockholm" tar, but had sourced their "Stockholm pitch" (best I ever used!) from an outfit in Portugal, who were kind enough to reply to emails during Covid that their pitch-mixing facility burned down years ago. In conversations with Mr. Rausch (and later the Portuguese) it became obvious to me that what we'd been using all along was a "recombinant" pitch--a blend of pine tar and pine rosin. It came in three formulations: super-hard (more rosin/less tar) for caulking wooden ships going into hot tropical waters, medium, and soft (more tar/less rosin) for caulking wooden ships going into Arctic waters. Then the penny dropped! An early 1800s reference to New England shoemakers secretly rowing out in the dark of night to scrape pitch off the hulls of ships moored in the harbor to make their wax from made sense. So I and others have been experimenting with a fair deal of success by adding back pure pine tar to pine rosin (NB: not pine resin/raw sap as the bushcrafters use). For Stockholm tar we're using this product: https://sprcentre.com/products/gold-lab ... rmula-450g

Pine rosin (versus resin) is the byproduct of distilling turpentine. The destructive distillation of turpentine from pine stumps has all but vanished as well--they mostly hydraulically press the turps these days for the hardware store-grade stuff. However, if you look hard enough you can still find chunk pine rosin, for violin bows. etc., out there. Since grades and hardness vary supplier to supplier, just start experimenting by adding a little tar to molten rosin until you get results you like. Then, you can add more rosin and just a hint of beeswax to soften it to the season/ambient temperature to make shoemakers' wax. After taffy-pulling the semi-cooled wax, the color should lighten to an amber-bronze hue, and leave your threads likewise amber--not jet black. Beware, most commercial shoemakers' wax is now made from coal tar (bitumen), not beneficial to the threads like pine products (anti-microbial), not very sticky to fasten-on natural boar bristles, and jet black. Burn a sample to test. If it smells like fresh Tarmac/asphalt it's bitumen-based. If it smells like pine trees, it pine-based.

Here're reference photos of pine rosin versus pine pitch (pitch is the darker amber stuff):

Pine rosin.jpg

Pine Pitch.jpg

[kemitchell]

Thanks so much for notes and more information, DA. I've seen your name a number of times in sources, researching this. I deeply appreciate your willingness to share!

Adding rosin to tree tar makes sense to me. The descriptions of the southeastern naval stores I could find essentially made pitch concentration out as a kind of dirtier parallel line to turpentine distillation, so there's clear logic in using rosin from the surviving process to concentrate dirtier, more chaotic tar. I have a can of Bickmore pine tar—emphatically "100% Light Pine Tar" and "Made in the USA"—on hand for experimentation. Only the smell holds me back. I'll try and share notes when I get around to it.

At the same time, I wonder: Have we verified the claim that bitumen eats natural fibers? I've read that a number of times now, but only as a bare conclusion, never with explanation or firsthand report. On the other hand, James Ducker in London reported using tar from roofers and road workers—doubtless from petroleum—more than a decade ago. In a comment to this post he mentioned learning to do so at Lobb's and never seeing a seam fail, albeit using the tar-based formula less often than beeswax and rosin. I might e-mail him, as well. I expect they've continued repairing their own work.

By the by, I got an e-mail back from Semplerfli, the UK-based fly-tying supplier offering "cobblers' wax". They confirmed their recipe is "pitch, rosin and beeswax". I've followed up about tree pitch versus bitumen.

[das]

Glad to help, as we're all in the same boat. If we can share vendors/suppliers of just the "right" stuff like Gold Label tar here, logically it'll keep them (and us) going longer to the benefit of all. Coming as I am from the historical 18th century shoemaking end of things, with my nose in books, "Stockholm" pitch ("the blackest" Reese wrote was "best" in 1813), and having been very impressed with White Sea & Baltic's (Portuguese) "Stockholm pitch" though the '80s-'90s, that's simply my benchmark standard. Rausch's was 100% pine, USA made too. That was our first go-to pitch in the '70s-'80s until we tried White Sea & Baltic's on the advice of British friends. Funny you mention the "smell". The high turpine content of the Stockholm tar accounts for that--it's powerful, wonderful, almost like a smoke-scented Vick's Vapo Rub, or Frankincense I think. Part of the charm of the stuff, like peaty single malt Scotch. Rausch's never smelled that good IMO.

When I started in the early '70s, making shoes and befriending UK shoemakers, the shift was on to premade wax, rather than mixing your own. Thermowax in the UK was popular. It came in jet black, brown, and clear/white, and retained some pine/rosin ingredients in the brown and white colors. Jet black Vestapech from DE was D.W.'s favorite--a bitumen-based wax--until he tried balls of the amber wax I made that is. But of course by then shoemakers had switched to using various wire "bristles" with looped eyes and nylon, so the great adhesive qualities of the pitch-based wax was less critical. Those of use who stayed defiantly with splitting and twisting-on natural black "Russia" (actually China) bristles for sewing needed the sticky pitch-wax.

I'm not aware of any deleterious effects, per se, of bitumen-based wax, just that it doesn't possess the anti-microbial benefits of pine-based wax, nor smell as pleasant, and it's not sticky enough to hold bristles on very well. I've studied many old shoes and boots over the decades, some underwater for 400 years, and the stitches are often still thread, happily encased in pine-based wax! The cheaper, more readily available bitumen-based wax has only been in use, perhaps, since circa 1900, so only time will tell about its longevity.

I've never tried Semplerfli wax, but as you've found, there're so many different definitions of "pitch" and "rosin" out there, I'm temped to follow the K.I.S.S. principle and just keep mixing my own. Besides, you never know how long a product like that has been sitting, off-gassing, etc. When I ran a production-shop hand sewing with 4 of us 6 days a week I cooked wax up twice a year, winter and summer, ~24 balls per batch in a iron kettle on a wood fire. Wax will off-gas its VOCs pretty fast kept in the open air, and turn noticeably brittle in 6-12 months, requiring re-tempering it. Wax that's 3-5 years old or older is completely shot, so I only make 2-3 balls/year at one time now for my own use--very economical. Rosin is pretty shelf-stable, but be sure to keep your cans of Stockholm tar well sealed, and store your recombinant pitch in a sealed plastic tub so it won't off-gas its VOCs prematurely and you should be OK.

[nickb1]

Just to add that I had bad experience retempering wax containing bitumen - specifically that supplied by Pechpiering in Germany. it's not pleasant stuff to handle in a molten or semi molten form, unlike the pine compounds. They sent small samples of fresh threadwax which seemed fine, but as @das says older wax becomes brittle. And a year later the stuff I had retempered was unusable again. I'm storing my current wax in clingfilm. One of the old books mentioned keeping balls of it in water, but I think this was only for short periods of time, it started to get a little slimy on the outside after a few months.

[das]

The 17th century shoemakers stored a ball or two in a small lead cistern of water on the bench, by the 18th century ceramic bowls. But, as quickly as they used it up, getting slimy was not likely an issue, LOL

[kemitchell]

James Ducker

James of carréducker kindly got back to me. Points to pass along:

• They're still using roofers' tar.
• Alas, a lot of what roofers use now has aggregate pre-mixed in. The pre-mix doesn't work.
• They haven't seen any shoes come in since the 2012 blog post suggesting it might be corroding threads. 20- and 30-year-old shoes show no signs of breakdown.

Semperfli Wax

Semperfli, the UK fly-tying supply company making a "cobbler's wax", responded to my follow-up about the kind of pitch in their product:

I have checked with our team here who make this up and its made from wood pitch ie rosin which comes from tree resin.

So it's back into the pit of semantic confusion, but hope survives that it's wood-derived pitch in the blend.

I will have to buy some and see...or, rather, smell, I suppose. It's available online even cheaper than the product from the bagpipe suppliers.

[das]

s-l1600.jpg

Just stick with 100% chunk pine rosin that looks like this, also called colophony, and the Gold Label Stockholm Tar "thick formula" from Westgate's, UK.

[nickb1]

It's reassuring that CD have not had shoes coming in with corroded threads. As I recall, the wax CD generally use is made from rosin and beeswax, the roofer's tar being used to attach the bristle only. Maybe roofer's tar can be added, I don't know, but it's not going to be nice to handle. It's also worth noting that the genteel London clientele probably don't wear them that heavily e.g. every day in a blue collar job that you have to walk to & back from, year in, year out. Concerning the simpler wax, one might ask, why would the old timers have bothered with pitch (all of them) if it were not an improvement on a simpler formula with fewer ingredients? Also, whilst the simpler formula works, you do get a more adhesive thread with pitch or bitumen in the mix which makes for a tighter lock on the stitches.

[das]

Historically speaking (you know me), as far as I know all the most ancient surviving recipes for shoemakers' wax consistently call for pine pitch, pine rosin (colophony), and some sheep tallow or unspecified oil to temper/soften according to the season--up through the later 1800s, all were readily available ingredients. The need for tightly-locked moisture/rot-resistant stitches, and solidly adhering boar bristle "needles", the latter in use at least since Roman times, suggests an "if it ain't broke, why fix" technology to me.

The pine rosin/colophony, and pine pitch were both ubiquitous during the era of the destructive distillation of turpentine, and kiln-burned pine tar from stumps in the age of wooden ships, and Stockholm was the preeminent hub for that commodity (Google The Tar Valley in Sweden). Thus it was only natural that "Stockholm" became synonymous with good aromatic pitch. Beeswax is a lubricant and only added to the pitch-based wax, in my case, because tallow ("the hardest sheep's tallow from around the kidneys" is damn hard to find) and oils (exactly which?) can easily ruin a batch of wax if you add too much. So, I started adding beeswax myself merely because it was a "safer" more forgiving softening agent, and in such small quantities (a few shavings per ball of wax) it didn't noticeably undermine the "tack" of the rosin and pitch, like too much tallow or oil would.

My question are: when was bitumen/coal tar widely introduced anyway? When did it become a cheaper and a more readily available substitute, albeit a poor one, for pine pitch-based shoemakers' wax? The decline in wooden ship building is one factor, and more recently (late 20th century) the switch away from the destructive distillation of turpentine to cold-pressing was the other factor. Oh for the days of rowing out into the local harbor quietly in the dark of night, and scraping-off a year's worth of "free" pitch amongst the forest of tall ships.

Hamburg circa 1900:

Hamburg 1900.JPG

[kemitchell]

New and Old

DA, I suspect some old southern dons may have rolled in their graves as you wrote about "finest" Swedish pitch! However, I doubt any will be rising again to solve our supply problem. They might all end up rightly in clink for wage-hour and conditions claims if'n they tried.

By the by, I found this page on pine tar from the San Francisco Maritime Association very much worth the candle, especially on the history of "Swedish" as a mark and British reliance on American colonial supply: https://maritime.org/conf/conf-kaye-tar.php That said, the page is as yet my sole source for many of the facts related there. I've no reason to doubt it, but no corroboration, either.

Having reviewed a number of YouTube videos about it, I'm convinced we still have the knowledge to produce at least small batches of "historic" pine pitch from fatwood. It's a dirty job, and I suspect we've lost a great deal of working wisdom on how to do it at great scale—many cords, week-plus-long kiln burns, and so on. But at least for shoe needs, paling against those of wood shipwrights, I suspect we know and have what we need to do it as it used to be done, starting from the trees.

I don't own any pine trees, so my hunt for readily available commercial alternatives continues. As does my interest in the best I can do structurally, fully leveraging more modern materials like silicone caulk and RTV sealants. But I understand levels of interest diverge there.

Bagpipe "Cobblers' Wax"

I received a few pucks of the "cobbler's wax" sold by Henderson's, imported from Scott’s Highland Services in Ontario, Canada. They came in packages branded "Piper's Choice", but with business name and address for Scott's Highland. Also "Product of Canada", so presumably made up there, and not imported from the UK or elsewhere.




The injunction to store sealed reassures me.



On quick sniff, I am not repulsed.

Burn a sample to test. If it smells like fresh Tarmac/asphalt it's bitumen-based. If it smells like pine trees, it pine-based.

We can now add Canadian bagpipe wax to the long list of exotic substances combusted and inhaled in Oakland, California. I do my part.

I grew in the "Piney Woods" of Texas, but wasn't immediately reminded of home. I've also whiffed my fair share of road work, and this didn't smell like hot asphalt. If anything, there's a kind of perfume to it, cold and burned. I would not be surprised to walk into a men's store in downtown San Francisco and find it smelling like this.

Here are two 7-cord hemp tapers, one raw, one waxed up with it:



A few notes:

• It's tacky to the touch indoors at 73F/17C, but not sticky.
• The thread was a bit sticky right after I made it. Then it hardened up a tad, to slightly tacky.
• This will definitely discolor light threads.

I have not had any chance to stitch with it yet. All on a late lunch break here.

It occurred to me just as I finished typing the above to check the smell against other ingredients I have. I would say the Piper's Choice was doesn't smell like the bag of Georgia rosin I have. The rosin very much smells like pines to me. Perhaps I'm confirming what I want to believe, but I would say the wax smells a bit like Bickmore Pine Tar. The tar smells much more pungent, even volatile. But I smell—or want to smell—similar notes underneath.

[nickb1]

I think hard to tell by the smell alone. The Pechpiering wax did not smell anything like tarmac unless you melted it down, and even then there is a mixture of tree products and a "small amount of" bitumen from crude oil (according to the manufacturer). So unless you are a kind of connoisseur of these compounds I think it's an unreliable guide. Did you try burning some?

[das]

Hey Kyle,

Great post and most useful content. As close as I am with the Gold Label/Westgate thick formula "Stockholm" tar, and chunk pine rosin melted together--the exact aroma, color, and stickiness of my vaunted White Sea & Baltic chunk Stockholm pitch, this is no time to get distracted by bright shiny objects. If you order a tin of the Gold Label tar, you'll have the exact smell-sample to compare all else with, and if you use it with chunk rosin, you'll get as close as possible. Being a bagpiper myself, I only use my own shoemakers' wax on those too. Why use any bitumen at all, or buy ready-made commercial products that contain it? As used in Thermowax (black) and Vestapech it yielded an inferior shoemakers' wax. If we're trying to recreate Granny's favorite cookie recipe, ought we not stick with Granny's raw ingredients? I other words, chunk pine rosin is not impossible to find, nor is beeswax. Pine pitch is the bugger, but chunk rosin plus Gold Label tar nails it.

Tack is main functional aim for shoemaking, leaving the thread feeling like half-dried shellac, so when you draw up a stitch tight it's glued in place, as well as holding the taw and bristles together without coming undone for the whole seam round the welt or outer sole. Though the stuff sticks to everything, your hands, awl hafts, jeans, car upholstery... An old (19thc) nasty prank used to be to clap a lump of wax into your co-worker's hair, like well-chewed gum it had to be cut out. But I digress...

From your waxed threads above, they look too pale to me, not amber-bronze, the shoemakers' "beloved colour" (Rees 1813, or Devlin 1839/40). One of these old boys waxes (pun intended) eloquent on wax (color and texture) and wax making, describing the rosin as the adhesive ingredient, pitch (rosin + tar) as the vehicle or carrier, and the fat/oil the softening agent. Rosin alone is too brittle, but mixed with the pitch (rosin + tar) it will adhere to the thread fibers and behave.

"Starting with the tree" is a great idea, but until chunk pine rosin and Gold Label tar become unobtainium, I really think we're OK for now. Of course doing an old fashioned kiln-burn of pine stumps has its appeal just for the experience, I think the neighbors might say otherwise. And have you checked the price of fat wood these days? You could buy several tins of Gold Label with airmail for that. And no, I wasn't dissing the Southern US rich history of producing Naval Stores (tar, pitch, etc.) at all--it was indeed a huge industry once. I've probably got twenry 100' native VA Loblolly pines on my property you're welcome to come harvest for stumps, but we'll have to look for a farm up-county to do the kiln-burn, LOL.

[kemitchell]

Nick: Thanks for notes on the smell test. I did try burning some. The scent of the pucks got stronger. Alas, my scent literacy lacks to name or describe it. The best I could do was compare to the rosin and tar also to hand.

DA: Thanks also for your notes. I'm glad you've sources for a wax that you like! And I have poked around online for Gold Label FOB my stoop in California, so far without success.

Please don't mistake my not jumping immediately on your formula for ingratitude. I am just a beginner shoemaker, trying not to blow this month's budget all on naval stores. Not that there's anything wrong with that.

I'll also plead apartment-dwelling urbanite. My landlord and landlady are friends, and very accommodating of lasting noises, busted-thumb profanities, and other shoe-related Foley work from upstairs. But I haven't even tried "rosin doping" the Bickmore pine tar I have yet, because it's not something I'm comfortable doing in the house, or really even in the neighborhood, with eyelines straight to a school and a ghost kitchen. I'll likely have to wait for a visit to friends upstate to do any serious cauldron burbling.

I also have in mind that I'd like to leave behind a good guide for beginning shoemakers. It's already possible to mark hand wax as a side quest, and recommend beeswax and rosin (I suspect) from Panhandle and some Maine Thread tapers for the first pair. But it would be nice to be offer hemp single cord and $7 fly or piper's wax as a full package for thread making. Then offer DIY wax as second detour.

I suspect that's what interests James Ducker, as well. I was able to order him a few pucks of the Semperfli product, as small token of thanks for his blog and tar e-mail. I've got a couple coming, too, for less than a nice Friday counter-service lunch.

Also some Buna-N, braided cord, and silicone RTV. But that's for another thread, someday.

[kemitchell]

Semperfli Cobblers Wax

USPS must've been on double-hustle. Two pucks of cobblers wax from Semperfli, the UK fly-tying supplier, came in today.

I honestly don't know what to make of it.



These pucks are much smaller than the Piper's Choice wax. As advertised, the included leather squares are fabric-backed synthetic.



The included barcode label mentions using on silk thread to achieve "the perfect Greenwells colour". A little searching online suggesting "Greenwell's Glory" is a particular fishing fly with a yellowish or olive-green silk-thread body.

The burn test did vaguely evoke pine trees, but the scent was much fainter than that of the Piper's, both out of the pack and when burned. The puddle of melted Semperfli turned green in the process. As did my threads, in the process of waxing:



The green seems to be the point here. Whatever "pitch" means in this recipe, it definitely means green.

This puck was also noticeably harder than the Piper's Choice. Initially, all I really accomplished was carding hemp fiber all over the face of the puck and breaking a ply. After cutting through the glassy surface of the puck, rubbing went better. The coating is indeed waxy, and was tacky when warm. But it is green. A dark forest green.

If it's made as I'd hoped, I have to allow that it's volatile, and can vary. My pucks were only $3 US apiece, so it may be they sat on shelf a while, too. That could affect the hardness and application.

Overall, I likely won't make a go at actually using this one. The Piper's Choice, on the other hand, has me more optimistic. But apart from the green color, which is quite clear, I have to allow I may be missing something about the best use of this wax.

[das]

Kyle,

You can never go wrong "prepping" with bulk Naval Stores, and samples of exotic pine products. Didn't know you were in an apartment, sorry. I mix my wax in an old cat food sized tin can held over a butane torch, next to the bucket of water to dump the molten simmering slurry into for cooling, pressing and taffy-pulling, yielding two largish balls per can. In a 900 sq. ft. shop it scents the air pleasantly of tar smell, not overwhelming. Cooking up pounds of rosin and pitch making wax in the museum's shoe shop of roughly 15' x 15', it'd gas you out if the windows were shut! I gottcha, you're beginning your journey with shoemaking, and half the pleasure there is indeed experimenting and investigating, trying this and that, oh I remember....

Another hoary fragment from my beginnings: the US co. Holt used to sell balls of "hand wax", too, amber colored and in brown paper wrappers in the 1970s. The Holt brand is still out there, I see their name impressed into "heel ball" polishing wax. That stuff was pine-based, but the box I have left has off-gassed completely. It used to work fairly well, but tended to be dry and brittle (old), which was when I learned adding beeswax was more forgiving than tallow and oil.

[das]

PS--I think the major take-away here is the off-gassing/shelf-life issue. Perfectly wonderful wax and the best ingredients can become crap in 6-12 months un sealed, and impossible to distinguish from originally lousy wax, pre-made or commercially bought. Heck, even the Holt "hand wax" might have been perfect when fresh, and smelled of tar, I was merely getting old balls of it ("old enough to drink?") from the local shoe repair supply house. I remember buying a bundle of bone burnishing sticks there once, wrapped in c.1920 wallpaper, marked .15 cents each.

[kemitchell]

VioVet took an order for Gold Label Thick Stockholm Tar for delivery to the USA by Royal Mail. Postage to California was slightly less than the cost of the tar, for a total of 21 GBP. It may be less closer to the Atlantic.

I ventured a stovetop experiment with Bickmore pine tar and powdered Georgia gum rosin earlier this week. Results were encouraging, but I haven't quite hit on a mix to recommend yet. I suspect adding 2 teaspoons tar to 50g melted rosin may be close.