Wax coated wood

[Harvey Pascoe]

Increasing numbers of wood dealers are coating their woods in wax and I am finding this to be huge problem. I frequently buy chunks of burl woods which now nearly every dealer dips in hot wax. How do you get a thick layer of wax off short of sawing it off and loosing a lot of material? If I try to melt it off, the wax soaks into the wood and makes finishing impossible.

This is really ticking me off. It was bad enough when they coated the ends of boards, but now they're coating whole pieces. If I scrape it off (try doing that to a square hunk of wood) I end up with wax embedded all over my bench and then it gets embedded in everything. I'm about to start writing nasty emails to these dealers telling them to knock it off or I won't buy from them.

[David Thompson 27577]

Scrape all of it that you can, then use lacquer thinner to get the rest.

[Harvey Pascoe]

Won't the lacquer thinner cause the wax to sink into the wood even further? Seems to me that it would.

[Eric Gustafson]

The chunks of burl wood are normally destined for turning projects. In that case it is no biggie. Chuck it up and turn it off.

The right shaped chunk could be destined for veneers, too. In which case I would just trim away the wax on the bandsaw or table saw as needed for the project. I wouldn't worry about the wax.

A card scraper would be my next choice, if for some reason the chunk isn't going on one of the forementioned tools.

[Bob Borzelleri]

I've found that, even for turning blanks, the wax pretty much hides the grain tone and pattern. I bought several rectangular blanks to turn some handles. The all looked the same in the grab bag.

After turning the second one, it was clear that I had very different species of wood. The first one I turned was mesquite and the second is still yet to be identified. Add wax to the fact that a lot of blanks are sold as "exotic" rather than identifying the species and it makes matching difficult.

[John Thompson]

I buy blanks of 2" x 2" x 12" ebony to rip down ti 3/8" x 3/8" and make A & C accents. I simply use the back of an old plane iron hand held at about 5 degrees vertical. I have used a hand scraper but it will flex more and the plane iron used on the opposite side of the bevel works best for me.