The Crispin Colloquy

wait till i get a package from Russia, where they still make some things the old school way. What they about to send is pure wood pitch, hopefully.

^Nice!

@Anton K let us know how it turns out. the trail has run cold too often, it seems.

On YouTube there are a number of videos showing how to make pine tar. A box of fatwood is the thing needed if you don't live near a pine forest. I found when boiling the pine tar to make pitch; the heat needs to be kept relatively low. If it's smoking; it's too hot. I stop the process when the level of tar stops moving. I bought 6 liters of kiln burned pine tar for a lifetime supply. I had to order it from Canada so I don't think you can get it in the US anymore. The Finns are the ones that like pine tar. They even have tar flavored ice cream. Birch tar is a whole other story:

https://www.purdey.com/the-russia-leather

Correction: Kiln burned pine tar is again available.

https://www.pinetarworld.com/product/ki ... e-tar-773/

Speaking of birch tar oil/pitch, has anybody tried it for making shoemakers' wax? https://otzispouch.ca/

Just in case nobody found this yet: Birch tar oil is also produced in Finnland. See http://nuvisal.com
They sell different versions ranging from thin oil to creamy fat. I got some samples some time back - they appear to be fine. Aside from that I used the one from suedapharm.de, which I had used to impregnate the welt.

OK just an update on the black pechpiering handwax. The lump that I bought from a shoemaker in Germany was old and probably dried out in storage, and the wax was flaking off the thread. So I melted it again with a lump of beeswax on the stovetop. Judging by the resulting oil slick when I poured this mixture into water to start reconstituting it and taffy pulling, there is a fair amount of bitumen from crude oil in there, and it took me a fair amount of scrubbing with soil(!) and soap to get the mix completely off my hands afterwards, (not to mention the kitchen). But .., it works. A completely different experience from welting with the rosin+beesax+tallow I've used up to now. If you pause even for a few seconds mid-stitch, you really have to yank it with force to get it moving again. The seam feels rock solid like it's both stitched and glued.

Nick.....looks like you've got you some good wax now! That's the way it's suppose to work! Congrats!

Thanks Jake. It certainly works. Not sure if I want to repeat this given the oil slick experience though! So I'll probably be getting some pine tar in from Claessons in Gothenburg, Sweden, for when this runs out.

nickb1 wrote: ↑Fri Jun 05, 2020 2:16 pm @Anton K let us know how it turns out. the trail has run cold too often, it seems.

got it. Smells strong, relatively easy to break, will post the final results of mixing it with other ingredients.

Hi @Anton K
I'm still on tenterhooks. Did you get around to making the handwax from this pitch? What were the results?
Nick

Ok - I think I got the main ingredients now and am about to make my first handwax from scratch (cod liver oil is till missing in the pictures). What is labeled as "Kolophonium" I bought as "Rosin" in the Internet. From Pechpiering I bought “Original Voigtländer Fichtenpech”, which is blond and appears to be a brewers pitch used to seal beer barrels “in open flame” (whatever that means). According to Mr. Piering it is the closest one gets to original pitch these days. Regarding the quantities I still have to search the forum a bit. Not sure if "parts" in the recipes is referring to weight or volume - any recipe suggestions are very much welcome at this point.

I read that once everything is melted one should pour it into water and then pull/ knead the material. I tried that with the Piering shoe pitch before and I found this to be quite messy. Especially if the mixture was not right at the first shot. When one has to reheat it, the trapped water eventually evaporates and thereby the liquid starts to spay out. (My wife was not amused about the stove and the smell in the kitchen afterwards)

In the subsequent experiments I poured the liquid in a tin can lined with Teflon cladded baking paper instead. Once it is cooled of a little the baking paper can be easily removed. This way one can also reheat it and add further ingredients without difficulty avoiding the spraying effect.

Unless the rapid cooling and additional water plays a role, maybe baking paper makes things easier to handle. What are your thoughts on this?
Thanks, Carsten

Hi Carsten
Why is there a can of stockholm tar in the picture?
That's a sizeable quantity of "brewer's pitch"! Would Mr Piering divulge what it's made of? ;-)

@@nickb1 , according to Mr. Piering the pitch is not produced anymore but they still have considerable stock. I think he told me that it is also a product of dry distillation, but I thought that the stockholm tar is produced the same way. Both products, however, are very different in smell, consistency and color. Instead of being rock solid like the "brewers pitch" the stockholm tar is deep black and viscous maybe like fresh honey. The Stockholm tar I had used before together with beeswax, when I tried to soften Pierings rather brittle “shoemaker pitch”. My hope was that mixing brewers pitch with Stockholm tar would get me somewhat close to the original pitch of our ancestors.
But frankly, I don´t really know yet what I am doing. Unfortunately, I don´t have any reference of good hand wax and its properties. For comparison I tried to get my hands on “Vestapech”, which @dw likes, but so far without success. Aside for shoemaking, it appears to have been used also for modelling animal heads in fur scarfs, see: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File ... oliers.jpg . Therefore I was wondering if it could possibly be obtained from some taxidermist. But seems to me the latter is also something only few people do these days.

Maybe I am wrong, but at this point I understand that hand wax ought to be somewhat kneadable when ready. My previous versions were probably always too hard because that was not possible and little particles would flake off and left a sprinkle pattern on our tiles…. Cleaning them took probably as much time as the sewing process itself…..

FWIW...

First Vestapech was produced on the 'other' side of the Iron Curtain. When the Berlin Wall came down, the scuttlebutt was that they could not compete in a free market (not even this tiny niche market) and close down production. This late in the game, I seriously doubt there is any available.

Second, I don't recall where I ran across it, originally but it was early on in my career so i more or less learned to make wax ends with it. That said, I was told that it was produced with petroleum pitch (my teacher actually used asphalt roofing tar straight from the keg), and although I got along fine with it, other, better shoemakers than I, dismissed it for that very reason.

Eventually, I learned to make my own hand wax and I got along with it as well. Rosin is still available from numerous sources (or was last time I looked) but i bought a large quantity of rock rosin early on and a large quantity of hard (+/-) pine pitch from Rausch Naval yards at the same time. If you are looking for pitch, I would suggest contacting companies that produce pitch for engraving (search the net for "engraver's Pitch") although, tbh, I suspect that mixing pine rosin and hot melt roofing tar might result in something very like Vestapech. You'd have to play around with it.

I still have some Vestapech but it has degraded to the point where it is virtually unusable "as is." I don't know if adding some oil or tallow would soften it and bring it back or not. Occasionally, I mix a bit of Vestapech into a batch of new handwax--it seems satisfactory when used that way. That said, I use dacron thread to inseam with, so the apocryphal (?) idea that petroleum products will rot the thread (I am a believer) becomes moot.

Finally, none of the waxes i have ever used was particularly knead-able when fully cool. But neither was it brittle. If it 'slumps' into a puddle when left for several days/weeks, it is, IMO, a little too soft. If you can tap it with a hammer and shatter it, it is too hard. Soft enough to slowly bend with the thread at 'hand' warmth and not so hard it flakes off the thread.

Hope this helps.

Thanks @dw , I think I got it now in two versions.

The first: 2:1:0.38 in weight ratio (Original Vogtländer Fichtenpech (brewers pitch from Piering): Rosin : Beeswax + some drops of cod liver oil.
The second version is The first: 2:1:0.29 in weight ratio (Original Vogtländer Fichtenpech (brewers pitch from Piering): Rosin : Beeswax + some drops of cod liver oil + about 0,5 tea spoon Stockholm tar on 130 grams total weight.

While the first version smells like pine and is blond, the second one is slightly darker and smells like smoked ham.

Both are passing your suggested hammer test. I had to go through several iterations. Instead of pouring the melted liquid into water I used a silicone baking form, which works great.

(My initial baking paper idea turned out not to be the best, since the liquid gets trapped in the baking paper folds, which makes it hard to remove the paper later.)

In case you don´t know what to do for the holidays :-) :

For the handwax @das had once posted a recipe based on pitch, beeswax and cod liver oil. Problem is that real pitch is next to impossible to find these days. The only source I know of is Pech Piering in Germany that still sells “Original Voigtländer Fichtenpech” a blond, very hard and brittle substance.

However, recently I stumbled over some old recipes in old German Shoemaker books (see citations below) and I tried to cook up some pitch myself, which is the basis for Als´ recipe. They are all based on dried sap of local conifers. Quite messy the whole thing, but this is what I got. I think it might be a good basis for your own handwax:

Last weekend we collected 1,2kg of that stuff in the woods. Here are images of a first pitch making experiment. I followed the instructions from Ernst Niederlücke: 1. collected the somewhat dried sap of the local conifers. 2. Boiled the stuff in water. The result is still malleable and has comparison to commercially available rosin which hard like a rock.
3. drained it and added some beeswax (although the orignal recipes say to add tallow ) and cod liver oil. Its malleable, has a nice smell, is quite sticky and I think it is usable for in-seaming.
A pity that I did not have the book from Niederlücke available yet for thehcc AGM talk.

Citations:
3rd third unchanged edition of MAx Sahms' "Arbeits- und Fachkunde für Schuhmacher", 1953, last para. bridging pages 84-85.
--------------
Black and brown pitch:

Black pitch is obtained from residues of wood tar. Black pitch has low binding power. Brown pitch is prepared from spruce resin. The turpentine content of the resin is removed by heating, after which it is made supple by the addition of other oils. To do this, it is brought to the boil in earthenware pots, which must be done carefully, as air bubbles form and it easily overflows. The oil is added to the resin with constant stirring, and then poured into cold water. The mass is vigorously kneaded and pulled with the hands. The longer this goes on, the better the combination of resin and oil and the better the pitch. Good pitch has to float in water and must not flake off when it is processed. The pitch, pulled into a strand in the water, is cut into small, manageable pieces (scissors) and sprinkled with talcum, wrapped in parchment-like paper and kept in a cool place.
-----------------
Page 19, 2nd para. "Fachkunde für Schuh- und Schäftemacher" by Ernst Niederlücke, 8th Edition 1949, first published 1936

Pitch is obtained from the resin of various conifers. Bits of resin are melted in boiling water and then poured through sieves or raffia mesh to remove trapped pine needles and wooden twigs. The turpentine oil that evaporates when the resin is heated is replaced by other fats in order to obtain soft pitch. Likewise, in the workshop, hard, brittle pitch is melted together with a little beef tallow - also blubber and oil (easily boils over!), then poured into cold water and pulled out under water and put back together again until the pitch is cold. Separated pieces are kept cool in a resonator with water or powdered with talcum powder.

Good pitch is soft and supple; it must bind well without smearing. Yellow pitch is better than black pitch, which is usually mixed with wood tar. When it is very cold, the pitch flakes off the thread, and heavily pitched threads even break.
--------------------------------
"Fachkunde für Schuhmacher, Erster Teil, Werkstoff-, Werkzeug- und Maschinenkunde für Schuhmacher", E. Lengerer, 11th Edition,1949, page 66:

"3. Pitch:
It is obtained from fir resin, which by heating the turpentine content is taken. It is very brittle and must therefore made supple by addition of fat (tallow, oil, Vaseline). The amount of added fat depends on brittleness and temperature. The colder, the more fat is needed. On average, one calculates for 1 kg of pitch 50 grams of fat. Too much fat makes it greasy and takes away its stickiness. Bring it to a boil in a clay pot. It overflows easily. If there are bubbles, add the fat and mix well. After this pour the mass into cold water and work it before it solidifies with the hands by pulling. This is very important. The longer it is pulled, the closer the connection becomes. Another procedure consists in softening it by pouring hot water over it and then knead and pull it with well-greased hands. When it starts to get sticky, the hands have to be greased again and again until it has the right suppleness. Good pitch must swim because of the air it has absorbed. It is also available ready-to-use in stores."

1. Collected sap:


2. Sap+water (if you use an induction heat plate its a really good ide to but baking paper between the can and the heat plate)

3.Boiling process:

more images

carsten wrote: ↑Wed Dec 14, 2022 1:18 am
However, recently I stumbled over some old recipes in old German Shoemaker books (see citations below) and I tried to cook up some pitch myself

Hi Carsten,
Looks like fun. Must admit I have not even got around to modifying the handwax you sent, having got some very usable wax from William Laborde's online store. I am surprised to see that pitch can (it seems) relatively easily be obtained from rosin by boiling. Is this really the case or is there some linguistic confusion going on, given the senses of "pech" in German and "pitch" in English? Threadwax is often made with just rosin, beeswax and tallow nowadays, given the demise of bona fide pitch.
It would be useful if someone could clarify the chemical difference between rosin and pitch, given that they are distinct elements of the recipes.
Nick

UPDATE:

I think I have finally found a suitable, available and affordable Stockholm tar to mix with chunk pine rosin to yield our much needed "pitch". I've played with 3-4 sample tars over the past few months, and this stuff not only smells right, but the "Thick Formula" has a lot of tacky-stickiness: https://www.dressagedeluxe.co.uk/health ... te=GLD0117 Please LMK your reactions if you try some.

This post will need to be moved, but do you have a source for shoe pegs?

das wrote: ↑Sat May 06, 2023 4:37 am UPDATE:

I think I have finally found a suitable, available and affordable Stockholm tar to mix with chunk pine rosin to yield our much needed "pitch". I've played with 3-4 sample tars over the past few months, and this stuff not only smells right, but the "Thick Formula" has a lot of tacky-stickiness: https://www.dressagedeluxe.co.uk/health ... te=GLD0117 Please LMK your reactions if you try some.

@das thanks for this, I would be interested to experiment. However, what is your current recommendation / recipe for making the handwax as a starting point? Is the procedure to boil down the tar until you have pitch? And then combine this with the rosin and beeswax? Or are you now adding rosin to the tar directly and boiling it all up? Thanks,
Nick

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

SharonKudrle wrote: ↑Sun May 07, 2023 6:48 pm This post will need to be moved, but do you have a source for shoe pegs?

Hi @SharonKudrle
I got some "Blauring" (German, I think the preferred producer these days) pegs from an orthopaedic shoemaker. They can order them because they are an agent for Schein.de www.schein.de., who list Blauring pegs in their catalogue, So perhaps you could ask Schein who is an agent in the US? I'm glad I did this a couple of years ago since now it would be expensive given Brexit ... Apart from this it's hard to find pegs, I got some dead stock from Barnsley but around 1/3 are not straight enough. I wonder if cutting your own from very thin woodwork dowelling might be a way forward, at least it will be straight and hardwood if you can find it thin enough.
Back in the days when everyone smoked shoemakers also used spent matches as a cheap option apparently.
Nick

Thank you nickb1, I just now read your reply. T hope someone starts manufacturing them again in different sizes. I'm not woodworker enough to make them. On page 160of R.A. Salaman's Dictionary there is Al Saguto's drawing and explanation of a home made plane with info on how long it took to make them using that method. In this Forum under "Boots and Shoes in History" : "18th C Pegged Soles?" there are more instructions. Not so much in the "vertical fasteners" topic. Thank you for the leads, I'll keep scavenging until someone starts manufacturing them again.

SharonKudrle wrote: ↑Sat May 27, 2023 6:35 pm I'll keep scavenging until someone starts manufacturing them again.

let me know if you find a source. Dowelling is very available e.g. https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/134124275413 ... s=ispr%3D1 but could take a long time to split them off in any quantity.