Weird question: anyone have clever ideas for holding chopsticks suspended while tung oil cures?
Context:
I’ve started to make quite a few chopsticks recently and decided to up my game and do a good and proper real tung oil finish. I’m planning my on letting my them cure for about two weeks with a light coat applied every few days.
I’ll need to hold maybe ~50 pairs at any given time.
I’d like to hold these with the minimal contact area so there are no witness marks. My thought being that a contact patch will not cure quite the same. I’m trying to avoid slight discolorations.
(If this is way overthinking it, let me know )
I’ve got some ideas I’ll vet and share here but if you’ve got anything in the meantime, I’m all ears.
As a fellow overthinker, I might do two materials, one at the back side, so there’s a natural split where you can dip the front and back separately. But, that’s probably way overthinking it, and it might not matter at all.
Last night I tried a small bowl with a hole in the bottom and ball bearings.
The idea being the ball bearings would provide a bit of weight and pinch the chopstick to keep it held upright. The interaction being similar to those “ploosh” knife blocks where you just shove the knife in anywhere.
In theory this would be very easy to insert/remove from the bottom or the top and I could just 3d print a bed of them.
I 3d printed a little test for 1 stick and…my dumb design had the curve of the bowl tangent to the ball bearings at the point of contact with the chopstick
This meant the chopstick was literally just pushing the small balls out of the way, turns out ball bearings roll pretty well. Who knew
For another option, while watching a fella work on handmade lacquer/urushi chopsticks, he put very thin nails in the top and bottom of the stick and held them like kebabs. That was an interesting one but I don’t want to faf about quite so much with each stick.
Thanks for all the ideas, I’ll let you guys know what I end up going with
A promising little revision. Once I get a few moments of free time I can think a bit more about some slightly annoying aspects…but for now it’s looking good.
Very easy to interact with, very light pressure hold with minimal contact on the stick.
Relatively small footprint (which can be much smaller than this prototype) and it can be 3d printed in one big array.
Same idea, just with a steeper angle on the interior cup:
Here is a quick video to show the interaction. Quality of life is something I optimize in my jigs and such, I don’t want to be annoyed using a tool. I think this will be nice and easy to use even with a bunch of tung oil everywhere while wearing gloves. I’ll post the finished jig in the not too distant future if all goes well:
20 years is crazy for a cat, here’s to another 20
The wife’s cats are aren’t torties though I did learn about a bunch of different patterns while googling that
These are just your standard, run of the mill rescue cats. The most interesting things are the long hair being a ragdoll(or acting like it at least) and the gray one learning to perch on my shoulder like a parrot. Good fun
Also I tried oil sanding with the relatively thick tung oil. It was pretty great. No dust, no chemical smells from solvents, no paper loading. A perfectly pleasant experience.
I’ll probably use tiny a peristaltic pump to keep a small about of tung oil dripping on the paper.
Tyler, I can almost see a bag in your photo, but did you use a bag to get the vacuum situation? I’m thinking of a broken Seal-A-Meal that I have saved to use for “a small bit of vacuum."
I used a chamber vac but your save a meal should work, especially if it’s got an accessory port you could plug a tube into and connect up to your own container.
The sticks in the photo are actually just sitting on some cling film to keep the chamber clean.
There was some surface bubbling all around the sticks which means some air was evacuated OR some water was driven off (this gets plenty low enough pressure to boil of water at room temp)
I’ve got to do some controlled tests to gain confidence that it’s worth doing. Maybe some weighing before and after to see how much they absorb.
Initially I was going to try and do a similar process to the cactus juice stabilizing and get the tung oil to penetrate deeply, but it polymerizes with oxygen, so only the surface is likely to cure.
In my efforts to make this whole process faster, I’ll likely stick with the short vacuum cycle and I may try adding in some extra oxygen to facilitate the curing between coats. See if I can get a few weeks process down to below a week.
A little extra oxygen in a chamber with an exothermic reaction shouldn’t be too terrible
Careful playing with oxygen folks, that stuff is volatile as hell in higher concentrations and I don’t want to worry anyone but it’s everywhere
I probably would have made them all a bit oversized on the tapered end…let the tung oil dry while holding the extra long tapered end. Then cut the taper off and dip the tip in a little more tung oil and let it dry holding the other (already finished and cured) end.
Or…if it were simpler (but I wouldn’t think it would be) leave the pyramid end long and cut and finish the pyramid end afterwards.
What I might do is make em really fancy looking with a brass pyramid for the top. If I do that I could hold it by the brass.
To be honest though, I don’t think the holding technique will end up mattering much since the tung oil doesn’t bead up and dry like a surface film.
I may end up doing the ball holder still since it’s a good way to hold them densely while curing in the O2 enriched chamber but…maybe the way we’ve been doing it for a couple thousand years is good enough
(Nah, where’s the fun in that!)
That made me think that putting a batch of sticks in a low impact tumbling process would work while they soak up the oil. Then that could be extended into a “drying” or “draining” process, too.
A quick update here after the first cure cycle, I love the feel of a good pure tung oil finish. It really does take an absurd amount of time to cure but it’s worth the wait.
I have some very nice lacquer chopsticks from japan that I’ve used ~daily for a decade and while they are much prettier, they don’t feel nearly as nice in the hand.
I’ve not tried oxygen yet to bump the cure rates but it’s not forgotten. Hopefully this weekend.
I suppose there’s a reason we’ve been using this stuff for so long huh
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