I suggested the new area ”Finishing", so I am taking away first post!
Has anybody ever tried wire brushes for finihsing? Not just for cleaning up, but to get some structure to the wood. I fumbled throuh some drawers last night and found those real hard steel wire brushes to brush off corrosion from metal.
I believe they would be too hard, but I know one can get to softer metal wires (copper?). Maybe those would make difference between the hard and the soft parts of the briar. Still no surrogate for blasting, since the wires would scratch some structure parallel to their direction (esp. if used as a rotating brush). But I wonder if this might make some interesting effect. I saw some petes with a so called hairline rustication. Something like that, but even with some grain structure visible,
I've done that before, and it's a very interesting finish. I got several complements on it at last year's NASPC show (I was attending, not displaying) when I was walking around with one of my pipes that had that rustication.
Artguy had a rustication that he called "Strand Rustication" that was was a wire wheel on a motor (I think that's what it was). If he winds up reading this we can ask him to post a pic...
I've used a steel and a brass wire wheel a couple times. If you do it right you can get a sort of sandblasted effect, or as mentioned a horse hair finish. Here's a pic of a pipe I did with a wire wheel a couple years ago: http://www.downiepipes.com/r3a.jpg
StephenDownie wrote:…snip… If you do it right …snip…
Do you remember some of the "rights" and the "wrongs" about getting a good looking finish?
Thank you for the pic!
Alex
It depends on the effect you want. If you want to bring up the grain in sort of a blast effect then a very light touch working from different angles is the best way to do it. The effect will never be as deep or as sharp as blasting, but it's interesting. For the finish I did in the picture it's a matter of simply pressing into the wheel until you get the depth you want. It's very easy really, just test out on a piece of scrap briar before you do it on your pipe. You can take off a fair bit of material pretty quickly.
I'm just working on a pipe with the structure under the bark left on the bowls upperside... Trying to get off the loose dark parts on the top level of the bark I used a brass and a steel brush and it worked very well! It did not seemed to be too hard and it did not hurt the structure of the bark! The result is a bride, well structured border and it looks very interesting up to this time (I've done all bearings so far, but at least I've to form the bowl).
By the way: To get off the tough parts of the bark I used a little pointed cutterknife - the briar under the bark is much harder as I believed...
Looking at this experience I think that steel brushes are not the wrongest tool to rusticate a pipe...
