i have been asked many times what is " the Break " this is the fraction that separates after heating to 240 250 C, and what does it consist of ? I do not have access to a gas chromato graph to be positive but i made a bit of progress a couple of years back at the start of Covid , I washed my glassware with caustic soda and collected the solution in a bottle this was left out in my shed where i happened to look at in winter it now had a white waxy substance floating on the surface ,this looked exactly like the white waxy substance that separates from olive oil in winter . this is Oleic acid, a major component of olive oil and this does not dry to form varnish so it is best to remove this to make linseed oil a better varnish oil they new about this in Italy in 1550 ! now what has happened to Raw Linseed Oil in the USA I suspect that It has been processed to separate the oleic acid which is a very valuable comodity which ends up in bottles with fancy labels as Virgin Olive Oil . this would explain why RLO wont break in the USA . and another thing when i did try to" break" it i got a vile smell! again i think this was due to the addition of Fish Oil to bulk it out which is good enough for tool handles and baseball bats and is only 50 cents a pint compared with $4 a pint sorry to ramble on but i wanted to get this posted !
my apologies for switching about between centigrade and fahrenheit, with glycerine the break temp is 240 C a bit higher without. keep doors and windows open to keep breathing !
It might be safer to use a sand bath for heating the oil. Put clean sand into an all metal saucepan, to form a stable bed for the beaker. Don't use a saucepan with plastic parts or any non-stick coatings, because the temperatures are too high. If the saucepan is of the right size, it would contain any spills if the beaker breaks and prevent a fire.
yes good advice but i dont think it will be possible to get the oil hot enough ! my latest video shows what can happen , fortunately i was outside with a metal pan with a lid i hope to list soon if you ever try it let me know how it goes , plenty of people give advice but no visual evidence that it would work and i am not paid to do everybodys experiments
I used to work as a chemist and we use sand baths for work where higher temperatures are required, for example, above 250 deg C. The link below gives some details, but I will let you know if I try myself. www.crscientific.com/properheating.html
Useful info. I have a small piece of teak that I want to treat with linseed oil. I believe heating the oil will help with penetration. I intend to heat the oil to about 150 c in a saucepan and immerse the item in the oil. Watching this has given me confidence that I won't start a fire at that temperature.
@@frankpallister I though better of it - I just put the oil in a can and then put the can in some hot water from the kettle. I only wanted to heat it enough to make it less viscous to aid penetration because teak is so close grained. It worked well enough. Thanks for your concern.
Thank you for doing this. Sure beats reading about it. If the flash point in an open beaker is around 222°C (432°F), and the “break” takes place at around 240°C (464°F), it would be logical to expect that the naked flames would ignite if they came into contact with the fumes overhead anywhere between these temperatures... yes? If this is right, is that why you recommend using the wire gauze for safety, to act as a buffer between the flames and the fumes? Thank you, kindly.
we always used a wire gauze in school when we were heating lab glassware (borosilicate )! i am not sure what the flashpoint of linseed oil is but the ancients must have boiled it with solid fuel in a metal or clay pot ,they did not have themometers and they could not see the break hence they boiled it to scorch a feather. this is the first step in recreating the fabled 16th century varnish and ignored by violin makers for 450 years !
Hello! I've met the recipe from J.Corsaut:1. Calcined lamb bone consists of a a form of lime: Ca(OH)2. 2. Wood ash contains the alkali KOH. 3. Heating linseed or walnut oil with 3% of either Ca(OH)2 or KOH for ten or fifteen minutes at 450 degrees F. causes the fatty acid of the oil to react and dissolve the alkali. On cooling, the oil becomes a clear, varnish like, amber colored gel. I've just tried to make it from sun-bleached refined sunflower oil. The Ca(OH)2 didn't dissolve and formed a thick pellicle on the top of the oil. Does the temperature should all the time be 450 degrees F? At me, it was a bit higher and grew fast from 450 to 465.
has your walnut oil been" broken" ? i dont find yellowing or drying time to be a problem , my varnish is chestnut coloured but i can vary it depending on the mordant
Im not sure what you mean by broken but im not suggesting to mix raw walnut oil with the finished oil shown here, if you have raw walnut oil process it in the same way as shown here just adjust your temperature to the different composition of the walnut oil. I did not make a finish like that myself but im very pleased with my oil finish that has linseed, walnut and a little thistle oil mixed in. Its also made by heating instead of adding dryers like most oil finishes.
heat the walnut oil until it breaks then allow the break to settle out and pour off the clear oil this is the first step in recreating 1550 italian varnish imho anything else is turbid
I’m wondering if any people with experience with raw linseed oil and boiled linseed oil know the difference between using the two products as a wood finish? Is dry time the only differince, and boiled and raw?. Or does boiling the oil change the quality of the oil and the finish?
The heating causes polymerization of the linseed oil. Linoleum flooring is names such because it was originally made from polymerized linseed oil. Thus lin-oil-ium. The heating is essential. Regular linseed is still a good finish but not the same.
it is not applied as made the cleared oil is used in formulating violin varnish i have shown a baroque fiddle,varnished, in my video "Violin Ground part two" i think
hi yes its far safer to use a saucepan i only did it in the glass beaker so that the" break", could be seen but if you have a thermometer or a feather that is not needed , do not put a lid on the pan but if it has one keep it near and if the oil were to ignite putting the lid on can put the flames out !
@@frankpallister Thank you for the reply. I had a go at it. Despite the container saying Pure Raw Linseed Oil (Sunnyside Corp.)I have my doubts about what it actually is. It didn't behave in the same way as yours. It smoked badly and was a greenish colour....also sort of cloudy. I will have to find a better source for the oil and try again.
i had the same experience when i tried to do it in the USA with raw oil bought from amazon it did not break and went greenish and smelt vile i concluded that the oil was processed not raw in the uk bottles of raw oil have a little sludge in the bottom and look hazy @@vtbakerbuilder
it does not break below 250 degrees centigrade you should see it but depending on your pan maybe not you would have to trust it to happen and you would know when it was poured (when cool) into a clear bottle and allowed to settle overnight or longer @@vtbakerbuilder
my only resin is rosin but with modifications based on the work of joseph michelman who published a book called violin varnish however i think his method was flawed and i have made alterations to a couple of things the main flaw is is totally ignoring the advice to boil linseed oil to scorch a feather he assumed wrongly that common comercially sold boiled oil was actually boiled but its not !
@Mara A just found your query ! i have no experience of beekeeping but i know that propolis is used by bees to seal holes and glue things up and the propolis is a form of rosin . so rosin in linseed oil 50/ 50% would probably be ok
you are quite correct but in the UK you have to work with the weather which did not want to help -raining hard when my cameraman was available , keep a fire extinguisher by ! Alchemy always involves risk !
watch the video ! no washing is needed, washing simply forms an emulsion of oil and water ,this is then thrown away which is a waste of time and oil !if repeated often enough all the oil will be thrown away, Duurh!
i am hoping to add my latest video soon but meanwhile i have made a very important discovery ! i tried this process in the USA but my raw linseed oil bought from amazon did not break ! i think that it had been refined, but it did not behave as raw oil , so just as boiled oil is not boiled, raw oil is not raw . this means that you must be sure you are using raw oil by grilling the manufacturers that nothing has been done to their oil ie acid or alkali treatment but i suspect the answers will be inaccurate
the raw oil i buy in england comes in clear bottles and i can see an amount of sludge in the bottom also the oil is turbid this was not the case in the US i should have been suspicious
What is the name of the brand please? I live in England too! I'm wanting to make a paste wax from this 'natural boiled' linseed oil to protect hand tools from rust. Thanks for all the info you've been very helpful 🙌🙏
@@frankpallister Hi Frank! First of all, thank you for your informative videos on violin varnish and ground. So I have a question, I recently bought some fresh cold-pressed linseed oil, which the store pressed it in front of me, but when I heat it I don't observe any kind of break as it happens in your video. So what do you think is the problem here? I even heated it up to 290 degrees centigrade, but nothing happened. One thing to mention is that I left the oil to settle for a couple of days and consequently most of the dark sediment that was settled was not present in the oil I heated. (But I didn't wash or refine the oil in any way.) I have two other questions as well that I appreciate if you could provide some insight. First, as you know artists in the oil painting world usually refine, wash, their oils to improve it's drying and yellowing properties. So does the "break" happening in the heating process have the same effect as washing the oil? As I understand it the culprits for slow drying of linseed oil are its free fatty acids which are washed, trapped in the water, in the refining process resulting in a faster drying oil. So, does the break while heating the oil have the same effect as it somehow breaks free fatty acids from the oil? I know very little chemistry, but I don't shy away from technical explanations, so any are welcome. Secondly, do you know if heating the oil more, which leads to it thickening and oxidizing more as I understand it, make it dry faster? As I understand heating oil in the absence of oxygen causes it to polymerize without oxidation which results in a slower drying oil, aka stand oil. But heating the oil in the presence of oxygen means it's oxidizing as well and I think that means the oil needs less time before complete oxidization, resulting in faster drying time, right? And if so, do you know if it makes a difference to thicken the oil before adding resin or after while cooking the varnish? (Well, from a practical point of view, I guess thickening it WITH the resin makes for a better judgment of final viscosity of the varnish, but I'm just curious about the differences if there are any.) Thank you for reading my comment and sorry for its length!
use the clear oil as prepared in my video , 3/4 fill a flask and heat at 300 degrees centigrade maintained for 5 hour would be a simple way.there are many variations such as blowing air into the oil whilst heating, it is very dangerous to attempt without good equipment and safety stuff, safer is to pour my cleared oil an inch deep into a wide mouth jar( 5 inch or more ) with lid and leave this sitting in the sun every so often take off the lid to refresh the air and stir the oil to prevent skin forming but if it has just stir it in to allow air to react at the surface again, after a year or more ! of this it will be pretty thick it is slow but relatively safe ! i guess this would be sun thickened oil which can be purchased from art suppliers as can stand oil
it is not really needed with raw oil but lowers the break temperature by around 20 degrees C and smoothes the separation but not needed in the stand oil heating
i have been asked many times what is " the Break " this is the fraction that separates after heating to 240 250 C, and what does it consist of ? I do not have access to a gas chromato graph to be positive but i made a bit of progress a couple of years back at the start of Covid , I washed my glassware with caustic soda and collected the solution in a bottle this was left out in my shed where i happened to look at in winter it now had a white waxy substance floating on the surface ,this looked exactly like the white waxy substance that separates from olive oil in winter . this is Oleic acid, a major component of olive oil and this does not dry to form varnish so it is best to remove this to make linseed oil a better varnish oil they new about this in Italy in 1550 ! now what has happened to Raw Linseed Oil in the USA I suspect that It has been processed to separate the oleic acid which is a very valuable comodity which ends up in bottles with fancy labels as Virgin Olive Oil . this would explain why RLO wont break in the USA . and another thing when i did try to" break" it i got a vile smell! again i think this was due to the addition of Fish Oil to bulk it out which is good enough for tool handles and baseball bats and is only 50 cents a pint compared with $4 a pint sorry to ramble on but i wanted to get this posted !
my apologies for switching about between centigrade and fahrenheit, with glycerine the break temp is 240 C a bit higher without. keep doors and windows open to keep breathing !
Can I use vegetable glycerin to act as a catalyst??
Now this is some information! Thanks for sharing, sincerely a woodworker.
It might be safer to use a sand bath for heating the oil. Put clean sand into an all metal saucepan, to form a stable bed for the beaker. Don't use a saucepan with plastic parts or any non-stick coatings, because the temperatures are too high.
If the saucepan is of the right size, it would contain any spills if the beaker breaks and prevent a fire.
yes good advice but i dont think it will be possible to get the oil hot enough ! my latest video shows what can happen , fortunately i was outside with a metal pan with a lid i hope to list soon if you ever try it let me know how it goes , plenty of people give advice but no visual evidence that it would work and i am not paid to do everybodys experiments
I used to work as a chemist and we use sand baths for work where higher temperatures are required, for example, above 250 deg C. The link below gives some details, but I will let you know if I try myself.
www.crscientific.com/properheating.html
thanks , i have no experience with sand baths so useful
Useful info. I have a small piece of teak that I want to treat with linseed oil. I believe heating the oil will help with penetration. I intend to heat the oil to about 150 c in a saucepan and immerse the item in the oil. Watching this has given me confidence that I won't start a fire at that temperature.
Have a fire blanket or a wet towel to hand in case of fire
@@frankpallister I though better of it - I just put the oil in a can and then put the can in some hot water from the kettle.
I only wanted to heat it enough to make it less viscous to aid penetration because teak is so close grained. It worked well enough.
Thanks for your concern.
Is this the same effect as when painters that shake the linseed oil with sand and hot salt water?
Nice, thanks for the info, hard to get food grade "boiled linseed oil" where I live. Now I can get my own.
Thank you for doing this. Sure beats reading about it. If the flash point in an open beaker is around 222°C (432°F), and the “break” takes place at around 240°C (464°F), it would be logical to expect that the naked flames would ignite if they came into contact with the fumes overhead anywhere between these temperatures... yes? If this is right, is that why you recommend using the wire gauze for safety, to act as a buffer between the flames and the fumes? Thank you, kindly.
we always used a wire gauze in school when we were heating lab glassware (borosilicate )! i am not sure what the flashpoint of linseed oil is but the ancients must have boiled it with solid fuel in a metal or clay pot ,they did not have themometers and they could not see the break hence they boiled it to scorch a feather. this is the first step in recreating the fabled 16th century varnish and ignored by violin makers for 450 years !
as you say the gauze helps prevent ignition of the fumes (basic lab safety )
Does it matter as to what glycerine we put in, and what was the ratio of glycerine to oil?
Hello! I've met the recipe from J.Corsaut:1. Calcined lamb bone consists of a a form of lime: Ca(OH)2.
2. Wood ash contains the alkali KOH.
3. Heating linseed or walnut oil with 3% of either Ca(OH)2 or KOH for ten or fifteen minutes at 450 degrees F. causes the fatty acid of the oil to react and dissolve the alkali. On cooling, the oil becomes a clear, varnish like, amber colored gel.
I've just tried to make it from sun-bleached refined sunflower oil. The Ca(OH)2 didn't dissolve and formed a thick pellicle on the top of the oil. Does the temperature should all the time be 450 degrees F? At me, it was a bit higher and grew fast from 450 to 465.
Interesting, I may have to try this
Thank you for sharing
Very interesting! Thank you very much sir.
You can also use 1/3 of walnut oil, its speeds up the drying time a little and makes the finish less yellow.
has your walnut oil been" broken" ? i dont find yellowing or drying time to be a problem , my varnish is chestnut coloured but i can vary it depending on the mordant
Im not sure what you mean by broken but im not suggesting to mix raw walnut oil with the finished oil shown here, if you have raw walnut oil process it in the same way as shown here just adjust your temperature to the different composition of the walnut oil.
I did not make a finish like that myself but im very pleased with my oil finish that has linseed, walnut and a little thistle oil mixed in.
Its also made by heating instead of adding dryers like most oil finishes.
heat the walnut oil until it breaks then allow the break to settle out and pour off the clear oil this is the first step in recreating 1550 italian varnish imho anything else is turbid
WoW, learn something new everyday
@@kol257 no try it and let me know !
Thank you Frank.
Will letting the oil boil and cool multiple times make it dry faster?
I have no experience of this but would guess no , try it and report back !
I’m wondering if any people with experience with raw linseed oil and boiled linseed oil know the difference between using the two products as a wood finish? Is dry time the only differince, and boiled and raw?. Or does boiling the oil change the quality of the oil and the finish?
i have little experience in oil finishes my interest is in recreating the violin varnish used between 1550 and 1750
The heating causes polymerization of the linseed oil. Linoleum flooring is names such because it was originally made from polymerized linseed oil. Thus lin-oil-ium.
The heating is essential. Regular linseed is still a good finish but not the same.
I'd like to see a video of what the product looks like when applied.
it is not applied as made the cleared oil is used in formulating violin varnish i have shown a baroque fiddle,varnished, in my video "Violin Ground part two" i think
Hello
Could I cook the oil in a saucepan? I have wide mouth jars but no scientific jars to use.
Thank you for your interesting video.
hi yes its far safer to use a saucepan i only did it in the glass beaker so that the" break", could be seen but if you have a thermometer or a feather that is not needed , do not put a lid on the pan but if it has one keep it near and if the oil were to ignite putting the lid on can put the flames out !
@@frankpallister
Thank you for the reply.
I had a go at it. Despite the container saying Pure Raw Linseed Oil (Sunnyside Corp.)I have my doubts about what it actually is. It didn't behave in the same way as yours. It smoked badly and was a greenish colour....also sort of cloudy.
I will have to find a better source for the oil and try again.
i had the same experience when i tried to do it in the USA with raw oil bought from amazon it did not break and went greenish and smelt vile i concluded that the oil was processed not raw in the uk bottles of raw oil have a little sludge in the bottom and look hazy @@vtbakerbuilder
@@frankpallister
Yes. It's very frustrating.
How long does it take before you see it flocculesce after it reaches 220 or so?
it does not break below 250 degrees centigrade you should see it but depending on your pan maybe not you would have to trust it to happen and you would know when it was poured (when cool) into a clear bottle and allowed to settle overnight or longer @@vtbakerbuilder
Is anyone able to list the books that he mentioned in the beginning of the video here in the comments?
Violin Making As It Was And Is ,Ed Heron Allen
Can i do this with a pan and an owen?
not in oven but a pan on the hob is ok ,dont do it without safety equipment to hand !
Hi Frank, thanks for the video. What resin and other ingredients do you add to your varnish? Cheers, Adam.
my only resin is rosin but with modifications based on the work of joseph michelman who published a book called violin varnish however i think his method was flawed and i have made alterations to a couple of things the main flaw is is totally ignoring the advice to boil linseed oil to scorch a feather he assumed wrongly that common comercially sold boiled oil was actually boiled but its not !
Thank you so much for the reply. How do you find the drying time? Do you use a uv box? Your varnish colour looks amazing!
one coat will be touch dry after 2 days in english winter without aids
@Mara A just found your query ! i have no experience of beekeeping but i know that propolis is used by bees to seal holes and glue things up and the propolis is a form of rosin . so rosin in linseed oil 50/ 50% would probably be ok
Did you say 6 degrees per minute or 60 degrees per minute?
around 60 degrees Farenheit should do it
Mate do it outside it only takes one mistake to burn your house down. A camping stove is less expensive than a new house
you are quite correct but in the UK you have to work with the weather which did not want to help -raining hard when my cameraman was available , keep a fire extinguisher by ! Alchemy always involves risk !
you appear to be mixing/confusing temps between C or F what is the correct C temp before turning off the heat?
sorry the temp is 240c with glycerine once the oil breaks the heat can be switched off
Does it matter as to what glycerine we put in, and what was the ratio of glycerine to oil?
Are you asking me or Frank?
Ops Frank
Thanks legend!
Is this just hardware store raw Linseed oil, not food or artist grade?
yes basic hardware store raw linseed oil
what you are doing here is not heat the linseed oil to remove mucilage?
i would not call it mucilage ! i think " the break" is better ,once removed the oil can be further heated above 240 C
Frank Pallister Linseed oil with some mucilage, its important to wash first?
watch the video ! no washing is needed, washing simply forms an emulsion of oil and water ,this is then thrown away which is a waste of time and oil !if repeated often enough all the oil will be thrown away, Duurh!
after settling for 2 or 3 days the oil can be carefully poured off for use leaving the break behind
Awesome info! Thank you :).
i am hoping to add my latest video soon but meanwhile i have made a very important discovery ! i tried this process in the USA but my raw linseed oil bought from amazon did not break ! i think that it had been refined, but it did not behave as raw oil , so just as boiled oil is not boiled, raw oil is not raw . this means that you must be sure you are using raw oil by grilling the manufacturers that nothing has been done to their oil ie acid or alkali treatment but i suspect the answers will be inaccurate
the raw oil i buy in england comes in clear bottles and i can see an amount of sludge in the bottom also the oil is turbid this was not the case in the US i should have been suspicious
my interest is only in making 16 century violin varnish by the processes available and documented at that time in italy
What is the name of the brand please? I live in England too! I'm wanting to make a paste wax from this 'natural boiled' linseed oil to protect hand tools from rust. Thanks for all the info you've been very helpful 🙌🙏
@@duncan5800 Bartoline is one of several
@@frankpallister Hi Frank! First of all, thank you for your informative videos on violin varnish and ground. So I have a question, I recently bought some fresh cold-pressed linseed oil, which the store pressed it in front of me, but when I heat it I don't observe any kind of break as it happens in your video. So what do you think is the problem here? I even heated it up to 290 degrees centigrade, but nothing happened. One thing to mention is that I left the oil to settle for a couple of days and consequently most of the dark sediment that was settled was not present in the oil I heated. (But I didn't wash or refine the oil in any way.)
I have two other questions as well that I appreciate if you could provide some insight. First, as you know artists in the oil painting world usually refine, wash, their oils to improve it's drying and yellowing properties. So does the "break" happening in the heating process have the same effect as washing the oil? As I understand it the culprits for slow drying of linseed oil are its free fatty acids which are washed, trapped in the water, in the refining process resulting in a faster drying oil. So, does the break while heating the oil have the same effect as it somehow breaks free fatty acids from the oil? I know very little chemistry, but I don't shy away from technical explanations, so any are welcome. Secondly, do you know if heating the oil more, which leads to it thickening and oxidizing more as I understand it, make it dry faster? As I understand heating oil in the absence of oxygen causes it to polymerize without oxidation which results in a slower drying oil, aka stand oil. But heating the oil in the presence of oxygen means it's oxidizing as well and I think that means the oil needs less time before complete oxidization, resulting in faster drying time, right? And if so, do you know if it makes a difference to thicken the oil before adding resin or after while cooking the varnish? (Well, from a practical point of view, I guess thickening it WITH the resin makes for a better judgment of final viscosity of the varnish, but I'm just curious about the differences if there are any.)
Thank you for reading my comment and sorry for its length!
struggling to find thermometer, can you perhaps put my nose in right direction please?
Jacob
found mine on ebay contains something other than mercury !
how long and what temp. to make stand oil? And thank you very much for your info :) cause I like to oil paint.
use the clear oil as prepared in my video , 3/4 fill a flask and heat at 300 degrees centigrade maintained for 5 hour would be a simple way.there are many variations such as blowing air into the oil whilst heating, it is very dangerous to attempt without good equipment and safety stuff, safer is to pour my cleared oil an inch deep into a wide mouth jar( 5 inch or more ) with lid and leave this sitting in the sun every so often take off the lid to refresh the air and stir the oil to prevent skin forming but if it has just stir it in to allow air to react at the surface again, after a year or more ! of this it will be pretty thick it is slow but relatively safe ! i guess this would be sun thickened oil which can be purchased from art suppliers as can stand oil
Thank you, I guess the glycerin is important too?
it is not really needed with raw oil but lowers the break temperature by around 20 degrees C and smoothes the separation but not needed in the stand oil heating
Thank you so so much Frank, may God bless you, and looking forward to more videos from you. You will have lots of followers!!
ps, I want to be friends with you on fcbk too.
If the glass broke or fell off the stove it could be catastrophic. This is very dangerous.
quiter corrrect always keep safety equipment to hand!
hi Frank would like to send you some photos of my new book can you give your email ?
Jacob
no thanks ! i risked life and limb to make this video and will answer relevant questions about it nothing else