Ok, yeah so the polymerizing stuff anyway, not raw. I've played around with baking raw walnut oil onto smaller pieces (the polymer formation is accelerated by either heat or oxygen).. it was interesting but not exceptionally productive (time spent better elsewhere perhaps). I'd like to play with making some of my own stand oils at some point, just to see how they work.
It would be interesting to know how well/if the walnut oil polymerized being mixed with the wax like that. I would suspect slower at least as it reacts with oxygen to form the cross linked polymer and it would seem that the wax would slow that down substantially. That reasoning was largely why I punted and just used mineral oil, I figured it wouldn't polymerize very well, but would certainly be interested in notes to the contrary.
As a side note, it would appear that oiling/waxing your cutting boards is a negative as far as bacterial resistance. Wood naturally entrains the bacteria and adding oil/whatever makes it act more like a plastic where the boojums sit on top. In this case I'm more about the appearance anyway so its sort of a side issue (and how much difference it makes in the real world.. not sure
) but its an interesting note.
The product I used on my snack boards and was disappointed in was this one:
http://doctorswoodshop.com/Products/WalnutOilPasteWax.aspx
In re-looking over his site, I notice the Doctor sells a mix specifically for cutting boards, so maybe the walnut oil paste wax mix was not intended for cutting board use.
Yeah, hard to say what's actually in that one.. A lot of those types of mixes seem to have a fair bit of volatiles so they behave more like regular wax pastes. It says "solvent free" but then "softer than expected" which is contrary to the "carnuba wax" which is hard as the dickens so I don't know what to figure on it.
The uncertainty (and periodically unannounced changing characteristics) of what's in commercial is one reason I keep figuring on formulating my own concoctions. There are however some I don't think you can beat, original waterlox for instance - that stuff is pretty bullet proof it seems.
I like the idea of heating the object when applying the mix...probably get better penetration.
That's the general idea, I've done it on some smaller pieces with a heat gun and beeswax and it definitely got the wood to soak up the wax. Now as to whether or not it was more robust... I'm unconvinced with just beeswax.. I think perhaps with a hint of carnuba with the mineral oil and beeswax as a carrier it
might be more resilient but we shall see...
The experimentation continues.