Easy wood polish!
Here is how to make a (very) simple wood protectant and polish. I’ve had occasion to use this stuff a couple of times on things about which I’m working on blog posts, so I thought I’d do a quick post about it.
1: Get some beeswax. It’s easy to find cheap on eBay; beekeepers often seem to cast the stuff into bricks in margarine containers or something, and they usually seem to filter and wash it too.
(I got a couple of big 0.95-kilo bricks of beeswax for less than $AU30 delivered a couple of years ago, but that seller doesn’t have anything on offer right now.)
2: Get some ordinary light mineral oil. Those little bottles of clear “all-purpose oil” or “sewing machine oil” you can get from the supermarket will do nicely.
3: Melt the wax and mix in the oil. Beeswax melts at a bit more than 60°C, so you don’t need a lot of heat. If it’s smoking, it’s too hot.
You’ll probably want a ratio of about five or six parts oil to one part beeswax, by volume, but there’s lots of room for experimentation. To play with the recipe, or if you only need a little polish, you can make it in an old spoon, heated with a small flame or boiling water under the spoon.
This simple polish is non-toxic, food-safe and won’t go rancid, and has the same pleasant faint honey smell as the wax. It’s easy to vary the consistency from thick and waxy - but not as thick and waxy as straight beeswax, which doesn’t really work as a polish by itself - to liquid-at-room-temperature. And it really is the work of a moment to make this stuff.
A little of this polish goes a pretty long way, so you can make as little of the stuff as you actually need, instead of buying a bucket of commercial polish that you’ll never use all of, or a ridiculously overpriced tiny container.
UPDATE: I have now discovered that this stuff also makes perfectly good lip balm.
That’s right - it’s a floor wax and a dessert topping!
