Re- a recent enquiry about equipment wax, op departed after one reply.

[Cabinetman]

Trevanion, you answered his question can I say, maybe in a slightly terse way but I can understand it, indeed I feel the same quite often, so.
A few thoughts in my head in no particular order, and they’ve been buzzing around for a while now, and not aimed at this particular op.
Are we too fierce? Is our goodwill being stretched a bit thin? Should we ignore what WE consider to be very basic questions that may be of serious concern to the inexperienced? Are we getting a little bit fed up of being asked questions, answering them and no feedback at all sometimes ? Are we asked questions – not quite sure how to say this, in a frivolous way just to start a conversation? Bit sad but some people just like to be in the loop/the club? Are we getting a little bit up our own ar,ses, and I include myself in that.?
And I was going to answer that I like to use WD-40 silicon. Because it suits me, my equipment and my environment. Ian

 

[marcros]

sometimes this happens- people register to ask a question. They can see the answers without logging on and may have no interest beyond the one thing that they have asked.

 

[Ollie78]

I must say that I have always received great advice on this forum and had some good discussions about woodworking in general.
I will help if I know the answer to something or can add a point and I think generally everyone here is pretty helpful and polite.
I do think that sometimes it can be hard to communicate via writing forum messages, tone and humour can be missed so easily which can lead to miss communication sometimes.
It is important to remember that all skill levels are represented here from people who are just picking up a saw and chisel for the first time to highly skilled and experienced pro`s and everyone in between.

Ollie

 

[Trevanion]

It's just wax.

I mean, what else is there really to say?

 

[Ttrees]

Presumably expensive though, compared to soft paraffin canning wax what you can easily buy in America.
Would love to know where abouts can you get that stuff from?

Tom

 

[Trevanion]

Presumably expensive though, compared to soft paraffin canning wax what you can easily buy in America.
Would love to know where abouts can you get that stuff from?

Isn't that stuff just Vaseline?

 

[Ttrees]

Here is about the best look at it that I could find, on David Weaver's channel.
Sorry it is not too great of an example, all I can find.
It just looks like candle wax in this clip, but I have seen it in other videos that David has made and it looks a lot easier to apply than regular candle wax.


Tom

 

[MikeK]

Isn't that stuff just Vaseline?

It's food-safe paraffin wax that can also be used to make candles. Growing up on a farm, we canned every season and used melted wax to seal the tops of the jam jars instead of putting sealed lids on them. We bought it in two and five-pound blocks, and melted it as we needed it. I don't think anyone does this now.

 

[OldWood]

Trevanion, you answered his question can I say, maybe in a slightly terse way but I can understand it, indeed I feel the same quite often, so.
A few thoughts in my head in no particular order, and they’ve been buzzing around for a while now, and not aimed at this particular op.
Are we too fierce? Is our goodwill being stretched a bit thin? Should we ignore what WE consider to be very basic questions that may be of serious concern to the inexperienced? Are we getting a little bit fed up of being asked questions, answering them and no feedback at all sometimes ? Are we asked questions – not quite sure how to say this, in a frivolous way just to start a conversation? Bit sad but some people just like to be in the loop/the club? Are we getting a little bit up our own ar,ses, and I include myself in that.?
And I was going to answer that I like to use WD-40 silicon. Because it suits me, my equipment and my environment. Ian

I've been using Forums and Groups probably now for approaching 30 years, and there's only been one or two occasions when I received what might be called 'abuse' - more accurately unhelpful comment! Rather unexpectedly that was on one of the beekeeping forums, which I did learn later had become 'fierce'. Whether or not it is valid to continue the coincidence, in that that is a bit like a beehive that has an aggressive queen, and that forum then had a number of members who were 'short-fused' and it spread to others.

There's no way this forum is like that, and self-policing via members or the mods should address it anyway.

Personally for 'simple' questions I would rather start with a Google search - others may well see a forum on specific subject being the way to go and I suspect we have to thole that.
Rob

 

[Concizat]

It's food-safe paraffin wax that can also be used to make candles. Growing up on a farm, we canned every season and used melted wax to seal the tops of the jam jars instead of putting sealed lids on them. We bought it in two and five-pound blocks, and melted it as we needed it. I don't think anyone does this now.

The posh little pots of stilton cheese are still sealed this way

 

[D_W]

Here is about the best look at it that I could find, on David Weaver's channel.
Sorry it is not too great of an example, all I can find.
It just looks like candle wax in this clip, but I have seen it in other videos that David has made and it looks a lot easier to apply than regular candle wax.


Tom

That must be a fairly old video!! I've managed to convince the mrs. since then that there's no good reason to put cars in garages.

I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that paraffin is used in a lot of cheaper candles in the US, just very clean in composition to minimize smoke.

The bars that I buy are Gulf brand canning wax (never seen another brand here) and though few people can, the grocery store always carries it - generally $3 for a pound of it. It gets lost or dropped and broken several times before it's ever consumed.

As far as people making things difficult, I always thought this was ideal (the bars can be turned on edge and dragged from the back of a plane to the front and literally cover the sole in one swipe - it took some later laziness to figure out that even scribbling is too much effort), but beginners are fair fodder, I guess, and I've caught Rob Cos(t)man telling newbies that gulf wax is sometimes unusable. Whatever that's supposed to mean - even if it was, it still waxes wooden drawers and makes oil/wax mixes just fine - it's got a million uses) and he sells people a much less convenient little glue stick tube of what looks to also be paraffin wax for $10 (probably with a purple heart picture on it).

Anyone who sticks around for one post is unlikely to stay long no matter what. Two things come to mind:
1) some people always perceive others as slighting them, no matter what - they probably do it in real life
2) aside from just being oversensitive, some people are clinically diagnosable for such a thing and there's no gate on the internet that sends them in a different direction

I've also used paraffin mixed in mineral spirits to stabilize pencils that I've made (that little adventure ended with some of them turning into bananas - and they stay straight when allowed to soak a bit of the mineral spirits with a bit of paraffin dissolved in it - which leads me to believe that if a soft wax is OK for preventing rust, paraffin dissolved into just about any suitable hydrocarbon would make a really cheap shop wax -same as one can mix mineral oil and beeswax for about $12 a quart here in the US and make a very useful wax that also prevents chapping)

 

[MikeK]

Trevanion, you answered his question can I say, maybe in a slightly terse way but I can understand it, indeed I feel the same quite often, so.
A few thoughts in my head in no particular order, and they’ve been buzzing around for a while now, and not aimed at this particular op.
Are we too fierce? Is our goodwill being stretched a bit thin? Should we ignore what WE consider to be very basic questions that may be of serious concern to the inexperienced? Are we getting a little bit fed up of being asked questions, answering them and no feedback at all sometimes ? Are we asked questions – not quite sure how to say this, in a frivolous way just to start a conversation? Bit sad but some people just like to be in the loop/the club? Are we getting a little bit up our own ar,ses, and I include myself in that.?
And I was going to answer that I like to use WD-40 silicon. Because it suits me, my equipment and my environment. Ian

I just realized what might have prompted this. The OP of the wax thread is not a drive-by one-post wonder and has been active since joining the UKW. For reasons known only to the OP, he or she replaced the content of the first post in the thread and title with "." five minutes after Trevanion replied. This rendered the thread useless, so I deleted it and notified the OP. It takes two mouse clicks to restore the thread content, but there's no point.

 

[Cabinetman]

I just realized what might have prompted this. The OP of the wax thread is not a drive-by one-post wonder and has been active since joining the UKW. For reasons known only to the OP, he or she replaced the content of the first post in the thread and title with "." five minutes after Trevanion replied. This rendered the thread useless, so I deleted it and notified the OP. It takes two mouse clicks to restore the thread content, but there's no point.

Hi Mike, I was looking at it as it was in the process of being edited, I got the impression that the OP was unhappy with Trevanian’s answer. I tried to comment on that post but wasn’t able to, that is presumably when you were in the process of removing it? Ian

 

[MikeK]

Hi Mike, I was looking at it as it was in the process of being edited, I got the impression that the OP was unhappy with Trevanian’s answer. I tried to comment on that post but wasn’t able to, that is presumably when you were in the process of removing it? Ian

I think so. The time span between the thread creation and deletion was 32 minutes.

 

[D_W]

i'm tempted to change my footer to remind people of the ignore function. Sometimes, I ask a question and it's just stupid and i realize afterwards that it was a stupid question (or I post an idea and then realize that for practical purposes, it's just stupid). When it gets blasted, I usually say "yeah, thinking further, that was a really dumb idea".

I hate taking text out of posts because what's left makes no sense then (and it suggests if it's done to manipulate a discussion that the poster either has some kind of problem or is being deceptive).

But as much as people get upset about responses...jeez, the ignore button is a wonderful feature.

 

[clogs]

D-W
bit like the MUte button on the telly.....hahaha.....
the white writing is the first to wear off on the MUTE button in our house....

 

[Trevanion]

I can be a bit blunt sometimes which isn't to everyone's tastes, if anyone ever feels offended or made upset by any of my posts they are more than welcome to contact me privately about it.

I'm certainly not on here to offend and troll people.

 

[craigs]

 

[ScaredyCat]

i'm tempted to change my footer to remind people of the ignore function.

Can I use it on myself?

 

[Phil Pascoe]

And just don't have a moan when someone's opening post is to knock a company. That's all I can say.