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View Full Version : sun thickened linseed oil



Noah Wagener
05-24-2014, 2:15 AM
Artists use this to make paint. Anyone use it as a finish? If so, do you mix it with regular linseed oil to thin it out? Does it need to be mixed under heat?

Also, i have a marine varnish Le Tonkinois in which the last 1/4 of it solidified in the can. Can that be liquified in either tung or linseed oil to give a little sheen? Again i would assume some heat would be required.

george wilson
05-24-2014, 9:03 AM
I would not recommend it as a finish. It always remains a little sticky,in my experience. Like,if you leave a vase sitting on it,sooner or later,the vase will sink in if there's enough of a film of it.

Old Dutch painters used stand oil(thickened linseed oil) to give their paintings gloss,but paintings are not tables.



The dried varnish has oxidized,and I don't see how it can be recovered. Best to not be too experimental(like I WAS,for many years!!!),on a project you have a lot of time and effort in.(I made varnish from old formulae for many years. Many of them were bogus). You can end up stripping experimental finishes off,or have it craze over time. I got into varnish due to making violins,where the varnish is an essential part of the instrument

Noah Wagener
06-04-2014, 2:36 AM
Thanks George. I think i may have to experiment with it a little. I was thinking of just adding a little of the thickened stuff to raw oil to speed drying. I do not want a high gloss film but more like what linseed oil looks like when you rub it a lot and do coat after coat. I have read that the "boiled" linseed oil isn't actually heat treated but has harmful solvents/driers added to it. I really did not notice any offputting smell with it but i also did not get the nice smell that i have with raw flaxseed oil. It also seemed to have some artificial yellow color added to it.

thanks again

Steve Schoene
06-04-2014, 2:35 PM
Yes boiled linseed oil does have metallic driers to help it cure more quickly. It's not clear whether it is appropriate to call these harmful. When the boiled linseed oil cures it is essentially polymeriazing into a plastic that encorporates the metallic driers and locks them away from being harmful. If there is a small amount of solvent then that would have evaporated quite quickly and not enter into the issue of being harmful. As George indicated adding stand oil which doesn't really cure to a hard film to raw linseed oil which takes nearly forever to cure to a soft film doesn't make a lot of sense to me.

An oil/varnish mix, applied and with excess wiped off after a short time for penetration will give a look as you describe, take only a few coats to achieve that look, and cure much more quickly than oil alone. It's film will be harder, and much more protective than any concoction of just linseed oil.