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Cooked Rosin is Fugitive


Michael_Molnar

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I have long suspected (as well has other makers) that the cooked rosin is fugitive. Below is a photo of two samples of cooked rosin varnish. The control sample is labeled "AIR" because it was left in the air outside my UV drying cabinet. The test sample is labeled "UV" because it was placed for 12 hours in the UV cabinet. It is obvious that the varnish is fugitive.  The test sample received less UV intensity than my violin gets because the sample was on the door ledge out of direct illumination from the UV lamps. I believe that perhaps the only way to use cooked rosin is to reduce UV drying and resort to siccatives as @Roger Hargrave did. Of course, I wonder why mess with something so unstable and difficult to control. I'll have more to say on this topic. Stay Tuned.

 

147573234_UVFugitive.JPG.ba51a5f276a2349b25b2dd857de968da.JPG

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Micheal, color derived from heating the rosin certainly will go lighter upon exposure to UV.

However, the color change will "plateau" at some point, and then remain very stable. This is one of the things which makes heat-colored resins difficult to work with. There have been so many times when I thought I had "arrived" at the final color, only to find it was much too light with three more days of UV exposure.

Thanks for posting your experience, I think it's very valuable.

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Even the unfaded varnish looks too weak in color, assuming it's the very thick blob that it appears to be.  Applied thinly, I think it wouldn't look like much.  I could varnish a boat with all the stuff I have that looks fantastic in the jar, but just a light amber when applied.  Oh, well... there are good pigments and lakes out there.

 

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1 hour ago, David Burgess said:

Micheal, color derived from heating the rosin certainly will go lighter upon exposure to UV.

However, the color change will "plateau" at some point, and then remain very stable. This is one of the things which makes heat-colored resins difficult to work with. There have been so many times when I thought I had "arrived" at the final color, only to find it was much too light with three more days of UV exposure.

Thanks for posting your experience, I think it's very valuable.

The same is true for some organic dyes such as madder, the purpurin fades immediately but after that the color is very stable.

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Fugitive can be ok, as long as it's predictable, I'd use Joe Robsons Gold as an example, this is a coating that most are glad is fugitive in nature as it's scary gold/yellow, but once you know what it does , then it's ok.

I think most are too concerned about what violins look like "now" A large portion of what we see with older instruments is uv age in both the finish film and the top wood surface.

Like children,time goes by fast and the years under the sun changes things. I think a common path for a varnish object to take is to start out darker form the initial color loading in the varnish, then a "bleaching" effect happens where things lighten some, this phase can be pretty dramatic, depending on what you used. And then after about 10 years many times it reverses and things become darker again,lots of this gets into how much exposure it gets to light

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12 hours ago, jezzupe said:

Fugitive can be ok, as long as it's predictable, I'd use Joe Robsons Gold as an example, this is a coating that most are glad is fugitive in nature as it's scary gold/yellow, but once you know what it does , then it's ok.

The "color" we get from cooking...i.e.... processing....pine based resin is a function of what we begin with and how long and hot we process the material.  Mike's samples are quite blonde in terms of the possibilities.  I find them workable for color varnishes and varnish that one would add pigments to.  Darker cooked varnishes tend to hold their color as long as they are not over exposed to high intensity UV as they are first applied. 

The Gold that Jezzupe is refering to is the Aged Wood Gold color which is part of the Balsam Ground system.  There is a color which is a component of the minor degradation of hemi-cellulose which occurs naturally as wood is exposed to natural light.  This color cannot be extracted from wood.  In order to give us this color as a tool I researched plant extracts to find a plant which produced the same color.  I am able to extract this color but it comes with another color which is fortunately very fugitive.  After application exposure to UV or sunlight fades the wood to the color of aged wood. 

on we go,

Joe

 

awc gold sm.jpg

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14 minutes ago, joerobson said:

The "color" we get from cooking...i.e.... processing....pine based resin is a function of what we begin with and how long and hot we process the material.  Mike's samples are quite blonde in terms of the possibilities.  I find them workable for color varnishes and varnish that one would add pigments to.  Darker cooked varnishes tend to hold their color as long as they are not over exposed to high intensity UV as they are first applied. 

The Gold that Jezzupe is refering to is the Aged Wood Gold color which is part of the Balsam Ground system.  There is a color which is a component of the minor degradation of hemi-cellulose which occurs naturally as wood is exposed to natural light.  This color cannot be extracted from wood.  In order to give us this color as a tool I researched plant extracts to find a plant which produced the same color.  I am able to extract this color but it comes with another color which is fortunately very fugitive.  After application exposure to UV or sunlight fades the wood to the color of aged wood. 

on we go,

Joe

 

awc gold sm.jpg

Part of the awesome sauce collection

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Let me make some points.

Like many other makers, I came away from @Roger Hargrave's Making a Double Bass thread believing that cooked rosin could be used alone or nearly so. I was convinced that his description of the Serafin instruments pointed to a way to avoid using pigments. However, Stradivari et al. used pigments with cooked rosin. It appears to me that the cooked rosin augments the color, and works with other colorants, be they pigments or whatever. But, this relies on a strongly colored ground. So, I want to put a stake in the heart of this false notion about cooked rosin. 

Like Hargrave, I find that color must be infused into the wood and not on it. This color must be so strong so as to almost pass for a finished colored instrument. The worn areas of classical instruments are my proof for this assertion.

I am done for now, but have one more idea to test.

Stay tuned.

 

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Hi Michael,

The only thing that is fugitive is the volatiles . The rest stands BLACK for YEARS: in direct sunlight, snow, rain , dry days and ..... for years!!!

(test pieces still holding strong out in sun, rain, snow .... no change from 2010)

Cooked colophony  varnish is stable as *****

Roger H. is right! and black is black! (and pigment should be madder lake or none = my opinion, for more reddish  tint)

DarkVarnish.thumb.jpg.806b2a5899480b8acb2ad38da29ae4ab.jpg

DarkVarnish2.thumb.jpg.6ae120122aec067d8b97dd5bdaa297ca.jpg

 

 

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I'm sure if the ancients could have obtained the color density they desired, pigments wouldn't have ever been considered an option. However, even today, it's a balancing act in getting the right color, density and optical clarity.

Some things haven't changed all that much since those times; we still use natural resins and colorants using 400 year old recipes.

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18 minutes ago, joerobson said:

Here is a drop of colophony cooked for dark color.  It is not burnt.

It does not fade on its own.  Varnish made from it is quite lightfast.

on we go,

Joe

drop 3.jpg

I fully agree, if you want dark varnish it should look this black and the color will not fade 

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On 10/12/2019 at 5:04 PM, Michael_Molnar said:

Peter,

I have made this black varnish. It is NOT what Hargrave made. Read again my previous post.

ok, I can't know what you do and what you are researching. I agree that darkening the wood (not by staining) is what matters, but I think your varnish looks guite pale

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18 minutes ago, Peter K-G said:

I fully agree, if you want dark varnish it should look this black and the color will not fade 

And I high highly disagree. Granted, if a resin it cooked to the point that it contains a high proportion of carbon black, the carbon black portion is pretty light-fast. But I don't think a black coloration is what most of us are looking for, aside from the potential usefulness in some forms of "antiquing". And in high-quality antiquing, black has only a minor role, if any.

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42 minutes ago, joerobson said:

Here is a drop of colophony cooked for dark color.  It is not burnt.

It does not fade on its own.  Varnish made from it is quite lightfast.

on we go,

Joe

drop 3.jpg

This photo is not informative. You need to spread it out to show the shading mass tone. Look at how artist pigments are displayed, say, on Blick.com .

Moreover, you are comparing a rosin to a varnish. A drop of my cooked rosin looks quite black. Let's compare apples to apples.

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7 minutes ago, David Burgess said:

And I high highly disagree. Granted, if a resin it cooked to the point that it contains a high proportion of carbon black, the carbon black portion is pretty light-fast. But I don't think a black coloration is what most of us are looking for, aside from the potential usefulness in some forms of "antiquing". And in high-quality antiquing, black has only a minor role, if any.

David,

The sample is dark, but the darkness does not come from carbon black....just the cooking process.

Joe

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21 minutes ago, joerobson said:

David,

The sample is dark, but the darkness does not come from carbon black....just the cooking process.

Joe

I was not going by your sample of cooked resin, which as Molnar as already stated, doesn't reveal much of anything, including light-fastness in a thin film.

I've been experimenting with heat-colored resins for about 45 years now, and yes, the color when initially applied will be quite different from the color when dried, and then other things can happen from that point on, ranging from further fading to severe blackening.

I'm not saying that it shouldn't be used or that it is not viable, but that caution is advised.

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23 minutes ago, Michael_Molnar said:

This photo is not informative. You need to spread it out to show the shading mass tone. Look at how artist pigments are displayed, say, on Blick.com .

Moreover, you are comparing a rosin to a varnish. A drop of my cooked rosin looks quite black. Let's compare apples to apples.

Mike,

You are right....

2 drop 2.jpg

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12 hours ago, Michael_Molnar said:

This photo is not informative. You need to spread it out to show the shading mass tone. Look at how artist pigments are displayed, say, on Blick.com .

Moreover, you are comparing a rosin to a varnish. A drop of my cooked rosin looks quite black. Let's compare apples to apples.

It does look more red than Peter's example. From what I remember about Peter's cooking is that he cooks hot and fast which clearly shows in the cold brown example that he posted. Joe's example looks more red probably form cooking at a lower temp. I'd like to see it smeared out as MM suggested to see what it looks like in a thin layer. I remember too that Joe also attaches color to his oil so that will also affect the varnish color.

So, colophony can be cooked until it turns to carbon and it will still be light colored in a thin layer. And further lighten with UV exposure.  I don't see any point trying to achieve a red varnish from cooking colophony on it's own. 

 

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3 hours ago, Michael_Molnar said:

Moreover, you are comparing a rosin to a varnish. A drop of my cooked rosin looks quite black. Let's compare apples to apples.

Mike,

Senility must be setting in....I failed to read those as varnish samples!!!!

More tomorrow....apples to apples.

Joe

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1 hour ago, joerobson said:

Mike,

Senility must be setting in....I failed to read those as varnish samples!!!!

More tomorrow....apples to apples.

Joe

Well Mike I couldn't sleep with unfinished business...I stuck this in the UV...no sun here for a long time....

Will send results.

 

2 drop 5.jpg

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