Wizards Metal Renew Polish

Wizards Metal Renew Polish  is new to me, but I must confess to all the enthusiasm of a convert.  Browsing the web, I came across Mark Harrell's video, "Maintaining your Saws" on his site Bad Axe Tool Works.  Given the outstanding reputation of these saws, I figured that if Mark Harrell recommended Wizards Metal Renew Polish for cleaning saw blades I should try it out. Reader, I love it.

You may well ask, What is it? I had no idea where to shop for Wizards Metal Renew Polish, so I took the easy route and ordered it from Amazon. It turns out to be part of a product line focused on car car. It's also available through chains like NAPA. It removes discoloration from a variety of metals, including steel, pewter, and brass (be warned, though:  if the brass is lacquered, it will also remove the lacquer). You can apply it with a cloth and then wipe it off and polish the metal with a clean cloth. Unlike some other polishes, it has an agreeable smell.

I tried it first on the blade of a heavily oxidized back saw, a Jackson, a secondary line for Disston. As I wanted to save the saw's etch if possible, I applied it generously and gently used a sanding block with 320 grit wet-or-dry paper. You can tell immediately that it's working because the cream-colored liquid starts turning brown. I wiped the blade off and repeated the process. The etch was long gone, it appeared, but the blade once more looked like steel. What I like about the result is that it retains the look of use and age. The steel doesn't look overly polished, just well-cared for.

With "well-cared for" in mind, I looked around for what else might illustrate how Wizards Metal Renew Polish works if I took some "Before" and "After" shots. And I realized that the table of my Delta band saw provided a relevant example.  I bought this band saw in non-working condition at least twenty-five years ago. I got it working and cleaned it up then, but I haven't touched the band saw's table since.  So here's the Before shot:

And here is the outcome after two applications of Wizards Metal Renew Polish followed by buffing the table with a cloth:

The table now is clean enough to reflect some of the colors of the polish's container. I personally don't want it any shinier, but if you do you might go on to use Wizards Metal Polish.

The label of Wizards Metal Renew Polish says nothing about corrosion protection. To protect the newly cleaned steel, I wiped it down with Break Free CLP, waited a few minutes, and then wiped it dry.

Another French Comment on Brexit

Given that Brexit is a mess with negative economic implications for the United Kingdom, it's a momentary relief to learn that not everyone is filled with doom and gloom.  In The Independent, Jon Stone reports that France's Europe Minister Nathalie Loiseau has named her cat "Brexit."

Why?  Because "he meows loudly to be let out but just stands there when I open the door."

Dillinger's With Saw, Plane & Chisel: How to Build Historic American Furniture

As a collector of American Colonial furniture for over fifty years and a user of hand tools for over thirty, I read Zachary Dillinger’s With Saw, Plane & Chisel: How to Build Historic American Furniture (Popular Woodworking Books, 2016) with keen interest. Unfortunately, the book fails to deliver what its title promises.

Dillinger’s six projects span a good hundred years. With detailed instructions and excellent photographs, Dillinger shows how to build a Jacobean chest of drawers, a William and Mary side chair, a Queen Anne stool, a Queen Anne desk, a Chippendale bookcase, and a Hepplewhite hunt board. But how historically accurate are these reproductions? A critical look at these projects soon reveals that they are generic, based less on specific surviving examples than on stylistic features generally attributed to whatever so-called period is in question. The sources for these six projects remain vague: Dillinger says that the William and Mary side chair copies a chair he owns and that the Hepplewhite hunt board comes from Vermont, but he does not give sources for his other projects. 

Even worse, three of his six projects distort what historic examples looked like. Dillinger’s version of a “Queen Anne” stool, for example, is nothing less than grotesque.  Upholstered stools with cabriole legs were common in England with its more stratified society but rare in America. Squatty with bandy legs, Dillinger’s stool looks as if it had been whelped by an English bulldog. His “Queen Anne” desk also has faulty proportions:  Colonial slant-top desks with drawers were generally about as wide as they were high.  At 29 1/2” wide, Dillinger’s desk is unusually narrow for its height of 41”, so it looks top heavy. His “Chippendale” bookcase possibly could be considered an example of early 20th century Colonial Revival style, but it certainly isn’t representative of American bookcases from the second half of the eighteenth century. It’s a modern bookcase with some period details applied to the carcass the way icing is applied to a cake.

Half of the six projects, therefore, present distorted versions of Colonial American furniture. To that extent, they are not remotely “historic.” Dillinger’s With Saw, Plane & Chisel is a useful guide to hand tool techniques, but anyone who wants to understand period styles or reproduce furniture that looks right will be far better served by Jeffrey Greene’s American Furniture of the 18th Century: History, Technique and Structure (Taunton Press, 1996) or by Norman Vandal’s Queen Anne Furniture: History, Design and Construction (Taunton Press, 1990).