Finishing Wisdom #1: Acetone

Oops! Lesson learned.

-- You can discover more about a person in an hour of play than in a year of conversation. (Plato)

Grin. Yeah, my parents used to say, of any operation involving coordination and potential spills, “you hold the narrow neck bottle, I’ll pour in the universal solvent”, which, at some early age, made me ask what you’d use to contain the universal solvent.

Styrofoam ain’t it…

-- Dan Lyke, Petaluma California, http://www.flutterby.net/User:DanLyke

Chemistry and woodworking! A beautiful combination, eh? Without chemistry, the early Arts and Crafts woodworkers would never have understood the fuming process in oak, we wouldn’t know that black pipe on wood would cause stains, we wouldn’t have any of the magical finishing options available to us like polyurethanes, dyes and stains….

Thankfully, a small mishap like that prolly didn’t make too much of a mess or create a hazardous situation, right?

I saw a demo on Letterman some years back (they brought in kid science fair projects – odd for late night, eh?) and I got a kick out of how a small amount of some fluid (could have been acetone, or similar) could “hold” an unlimited amount of styrofoam peanuts. Disolved them much faster than water can “take out” a sink full of the starchy kind.

-- I am always doing what I cannot do yet, in order to learn how to do it. - Vincent Van Gogh