Question on shellac

ok, now i'm going to weigh in on the subject, since i use shellac on just about everything. i couldn't belive my eyes when it was mentioned that there was a water based shellac. since i've used shellac for over 10 years now, the only shellacs i had heard of were solvent, or alcohol based shellacs. when i did a search on shellac flakes and water, the only items that came up were a water based shellac from target, and instructions for speeding up dissolving shellac in alcohol by placing it in a warm water bath. so i decided to call my guru of everything that is paint, varnish, and sundries (family business for over 50 years), and asked him about this stuff. he said that the only way they could dissolve shellac in water, was to use some form of detergent to get the flakes to liquify. he said that he would not recommend it, since any water would reliquify the finish. i would say stick with the normal shellac.

The Target water based shellac is real shellac, not dissolved in water with detergent, but in the complex chemistry that allows lacquer, varnish, poly, and other normally solvent based finishes to be water based. When the water evaporates, the chemical magic happens.

The water based shellac works just like alcohol based shellac, except.... and here it comes... the chemistry used is apparently similar to the chemistry used for Target Lacquer, so the Lacquer burns into the shellac, rather than the shellac being a barrier coat. I had to switch to a different Target finish (a conversion varnish) to override the burn in on a project where I put WB Lacquer over WB Shellac.

But for any other use, the Water Based Shellac from Target appears to be "normal" shellac. It pops the grain and wood color like solvent shellac, etc. And it sprays or brushes on and cleans up like a well-behaved water based finish (not like latex paint).

all i know charlie, is that that's the straight skinny from someone who's been in and around this kind of stuff for over 40 years. also, i've done some further checking on this product, and it is made by dissolving shellac flakes in an alkali solution (sodium hydroxide (lye) and water), to create this form of shellac. lye is a common base for the making of soaps and detergents. so one could say it is made with a form of a detergent solution. shellac flakes will not dissolve in plain water, they'll float, but they will not dissolve.