I always wondered whether the wooden spatulas and spoons they sell at IKEA are safe to use. I never know what that wood was treated with or coated with.
Dude already found the perfect thing, but wanted an excuse to play with random metallic driers and resins instead. Fine, but don't pretend it was necessary.
But it’s really hard to mix properly and apply on small wooden objects like spoons and cups. I almost always use too much accelerator,
Just use a precision scale. Pharmacists give me side-eye when I mention cutting my medicine. No, I do small-scale epoxy mixing!
Author here, it's not that it's not possible, it's just annoying to do. Indeed, two-component hardwax oils are close to perfect (although the resulting polymer is not ideal), but having to do the precise pouring and mixing, and trying to smear that thick blend onto the wood, hundreds and hundreds of times, is not something I want to do.
I want to enjoy the process of making the wooden utensil as much as I want to see the end result, hence my excuse to play with random metallic driers and resins.
> Some carvers use urushi lacquer which is the sap from a tree common to Japan.
Urushi is the name of the Japanese tree, Toxicodendron verniciflua (the genus formerly was named Rhus), and of the lacquer of which its sap is the main constituent.
The lacquer is also called urushiol (note, not urushoil), which is also the resinous substance found in other members of the Toxicodendron genus: T. radicans and T. rydbergii, or poison ivy; T. diversilobum and T. pubescens, poison oak; and T. vernix, poison sumac. The resinous oil is what causes allergic reactions.
Which finally gets to my point: What are the allergic affects of the tree, its raw sap, the liquid lacquer, and maybe for hypersenstive/reactive urushiol allergies, the finished lacquer?
I don't meant to be alarmist - people have been eating off urushi lacquer for centuries. I'm thinking more about working with it.
EDIT: For those interested in the scientific aspects of the resin, plants, and allergic reaction:
Aaron C. Gladman MD. Toxicodendron Dermatitis: Poison Ivy, Oak, and Sumac. Wilderness & Environmental Medicine vol 17 #2 (June 2006)
Some people react very badly, some are immune. But to be honest I just don't like my spoons and cups to look lacquered and I don't prefer the process of application.
Nothing wrong with that though, I like reading and watching people do the process and seeing them enjoy the calmness in doing dozens of layers over multiple days. Some end up with very beautiful shimmery brown wooden pieces [0] and I would love to own some of them. It's just not my style.
Alin (OP), what a wonderful article. I've had the same problem and had given up experimenting for similar reasons to you. I'm now thinking to finish the cup I've half carved and have sitting on the shelf in the shed. Thanks!
Your shop looks great too. Others might enjoy folowing the link buried towards the bottom of the article.
Thank you for the kind words! Do try to finish your cup, it's a great experience both to drink from something made by your hands, and to drink from a wooden cup if it's finished well.
Make sure you do water popping after finishing the carving and sanding process. It's what makes the difference between wood that catches your lips and wood that feels like ceramic. The process is simple: sand with 600 or 400 grit, whichever you have, then get all the wood wet with water (faucet is fine), let dry completely (hairdryer helps), sand again with 600/400 grit and repeat about 3 times until wetting the wood no longer makes it feel rough.
I make wooden cups. I use water-based polyurethane out of a spray can to waterproof the interiors. I find it a lot easier to use than epoxy in almost every aspect.
For the exterior and for cutting boards, I use a hard wax oil I make from linseed oil and beeswax. It's easy to prepare and I usually provide a small cup of it to whomever I'm gifting the cutting board.
I reuse small, glass jelly jars with screw-on metal lids, about 1/2 a cup in size. You do need to leave a layer of water on top, though, because otherwise the top layer will polymerize and leave a rubbery layer you have to remove the next time you use it.
Interesting, I'll have to give that a detailed read later. It might be applicable to 3D prints.
To head off the people who will jump up-and-down calling me paranoid for not considering untreated printed works food safe, and accusing me of accusing them of poisoning family & friends (in some circles the discussion can get more cantankerous than the vi/emacs thing!): you keep using printed things for food without treatment if you like, and I won't judge, but I prefer to remain paranoid because if printed items were food safe it would be a selling point and I don't see any manufacturers using food based examples in their advertising.
This is an interesting article, though I wish they had relaxed some of the requirements. Demanding something that both cures fast and is free of solvents seems unnecessarily specific. For hobby projects finishing on a tight deadline is usually not a high priority so longer cure times are an acceptable tradeoff. For larger scale or business oriented projects the use of a solvent can be fine because proper VOC protective gear is not that expensive.
Even for hobby work it’s not hard to get reasonable VOC protective gear or establish a fume extraction hood out of some cardboard and a cheap box fan next to a window in the shop space.
My biggest grief with wooden utensils replaceing plastic ones and cardboard(-ish) cup lids replacing plastic lids is the texture - I almost shudder everytime these environmentally friendly replacements touch my mouth, to the point that I eat in the most ridiculous way in order to avoid having to touch the wooden fork when I'm trying to get the food off of it.
And the reason is exactly the finish. Metal and plastic spoons, forks, lids, etc. are nice and smooth and don't get in your way. Cheaply made wood or cardboards ones are rough and tacky.
Of course you could argue that from an environmental standpoint, that's not a bug but a feature: now I'm using even less disposable stuff (first, no plastic because it's been replaced by other stuff; and second also the replacements because I hate using them).
This is the hardest thing about selling wooden spoons and especially cups. Like you, most people think about the rough texture they felt when using cheap or disposable wooden utensils.
My spoons and cups feel more like warm textured ceramic. They are sanded to a high 600 grit, water popped multiple times to make sure the grain doesn't raise and the texture stays smooth, and finished with drying oils as you see in the article to keep the surface highly hydrophobic.
I really can't describe it in words, but everyone I know who tried eating with my wooden spoons and drank from my coffee cups, was pleasantly surprised of the feeling.
That's why most of my sales happen in person at local craft markets, because there, people can take the cup into their hand, they can feel the smoothness, and they can ask about the same things you are worried about.
All I can recommend is find a spoon carver in your area, or one that ships there, and try a hand carved eating spoon. I'm not saying it's better than metal, ceramic or plastic, it's just a different experience that some people enjoy.
I use wood only for my non-stick pans. Metal for the metal pans. I sometime put some olive oil on the utensils, but generally, I just use them, put them in the dishwasher, repeat, until they break. They are ~50 cents at Ikea. And so I don't eat any plastics anymore.
Of course, the article is about high end stuff, but I just want to put everything in the dishwasher. Which I presume you can't do with even the best coated high end utensils?
We also switched to wooden Cutting boards, I find them to be pretty annoying as they really go bad fast in the dishwasher and can be quite expensive. We just wash them with boiling water, a bit of soap every now and then.
Osmo Polyx is what I already had around from other wooden furniture projects, that's all. I try to not store too many cans of unused finishes around my house so I try to use what I already have first.
Top Oil indeed seems very similar to what I did (hardwax, drying oils, driers) but half of it is still white spirit solvent, which I'm guessing will give it the same smell as Polyx.
Some recommend non-edible petrol-based mineral oil (aka liquid parrafin) because it doesn’t go rancid, but has the same effect of not actually doing much for protection and will leak into hot liquids.
Why even use wood if you’re going to cover it in a layer of clear plastic?
I find it amusing that those who will use wood or "natural" (petroleum is also naturally occurring...) products for some sort of weird misguided eco-virtue-signaling, inevitably end up needing to basically reinvent the chemistry of finding an inert, durable material that brought us modern plastics. All these drying oils create a layer of polymerised material, which can be classed as plastic anyway. Waxes, regardless of source, attribute their properties to long hydrocarbon chains, just like polyethylene.
Author here, I was mostly referring to the practice of coating the wood in a layer of smooth plastic that makes the wood not feel and look like wood anymore. It's like something that you want to keep encased forever.
I'm of the same opinion as you, drying oil polymers are still plastic, it's just that their method of curing makes them look better on wood, most likely because of the very thin layer that remains at the surface, but also because of the polymer surface texture.
Every epoxy resin, even the more penetrant ones, end up looking like plastic on wood, not sure how else to describe it.
But in terms of chemistry, food safety and how inert they are, they are indistinguishable.
I'm also aware mineral oil is food safe, I was trying to say that it will leak into the hot food and not stay in the wood fibers, which renders the finish useless after just one use.
Woodworker and person who has spent a tremendous amount of time on wood finishing chemistry here.
This is very confused.
First, all wood finishes you can buy are food-safe once cured. They aren't allowed to be sold otherwise, at least in the US/Europe/et al.
If you are using them once heated, this is not always as true (and regulations vary a bit), but if we are talking about food prep/salad/you name it, they are all safe.
Heat wise, if we are talking about using it in boiling water to stir something, most finishes would be fine from a safety standpoint (not all can withstand this though).
As a general rule of thumb, if you aren't heating the wood above 200F, you aren't really going to get a finishes to release toxic fumes[1]
Second, as for solvents - smell is not everything. The HDI he mentions rubio having will not smell like anything until the concentration is way way way way too high. If you can smell it, you are in trouble. HDI is also much more dangerous than most solvents[2].
The oil is also a solvent.
Solvents are just things that you can dissolve something else in.
If they want to avoid certain types of solvents for some reason, that should be about safety or something, and if they want to evaluate that, smell is probably the wrong evaluation criteria.
To give one example of solvent elimination with a purpose, let's take VOC's, which are about pollution[3].
Avoiding VOC solvents makes for cleaner air, but again, VOC compliant/exempt/etc solvents vary wildly in whether they are safer for people or not than non-VOC exempt solvents.
If you are trying instead to avoid human-toxic solvents, you would choose a different set, etc.
[1] There are so many finishes with so many different properties that i can't 100% guarantee this, but non-professional stuff you can buy at a woodworking store or a big box store is going to be fine
[2] The lack of smell of isocyanate's is main the reason you can get service life indicating respirator catridges from 3m/et al - otherwise you would not be able to determine if your cartridge is working or not, since you would not smell it when spray finishing/etc until the concentration is way too high, even if your cartridge is spent. Sane folks just use supplied air anyway, rather than risk it at all.
[3] not safety to humans, though often highly confused with being safer.
They deliberately label the not food safe ones as "not food safe" and "not a wood finish". They have to.
So if you are using that as a wood finish, you get what you get?
Also most of it is still food safe when cured anyway, it just does't always fully cure and it's hard to tell when it's cured.
But once the polymerization/etc has actually finished, there are no oxidizing agents or driers or ... left.
If you look at the law suits that lead to it being labeled the way it is, it's not about food safe when cured, it's about the inability to tell when curing actually finished, and final curing taking a very long time.
Cobalt is an element and polymerization is not a nuclear reaction, so there's still cobalt in the finish when it finishes curing. The driers are catalysts AFAIK.
- most finishes are indeed "food safe after curing", I'm aware of that. How they look on wood, how they perform when being dipped in hot soup or when drinking hot liquids from them, that's harder to assess without buying cans of finish that I have to store forever if I don't like them.
- HDI doesn't smell indeed, I never said it did. In fact two-component hardwax oils would have been perfect if it was easier to mix and apply in small quantities. Unfortunately for the few drops of oil I need on a spoon, it's too messy
- I'm talking about solvents in the definition that most consumers know about them: volatile solvents that usually smell strongly. I used low-VOC solvent-based finishes and they still smell. Organic components aren't the only smelly things in solvents, and I simply can't stand them anymore, that's all. It's not all about the dangers, it's for my own comfort.
If you can point me to a solvent-based hardwax oil that smells of only the oils and waxes inside, I'll buy it in a pinch and forget about melting waxes in my microwave. Google search doesn't help here, I need to hear it from someone with experience
I treat the spoons and ladles I carve with food grade organic flax/linseed oil and roast in a fan oven at 180 deg C, giving a robust coating that is also very safe. A few coats are required to fill all the pores in the wood for a beautiful satin finish but all the coats can be completed in a couple of hours total. Colours start at a something slightly darker than the natural oil colour and darken to the colour of chocolate depending on how long they’re in the oven for. The smell is of hot cooking oil unless you go for full chocolate brown in which case it starts to smell of burnt oil and a bit smoky. Fully dry your item first and heat it up slowly in the oven to 180 deg C before applying the first coat so that all areas cure and colour equally. Saturate the wood initially then wipe off all excess with a paper towel which you can then use to add the subsequent coats. Check on the spoon and remove any drips that appear during roasting before they harden. Silicone oven mitts are great for handling the spoons while hot.
Author here, I also bought a dehydrator to keep my finished spoons at 70C (158F) for 10 hours to speed up the curing of the tung oil. It really works wonders!
I prefer to keep the original color of the wood I sell, so lower temperatures are better for me, but I like the look of toasted wood as well.
My problem with just oil is that the finish is very matte, hence the wax and resin complication I'm going through in the article. But matte is also a look that people look for so there's no problem in that, it's just my personal preference and style that's different.
The timing of this is sort of uncanny as it's been on my mind a lot lately.
Generally I use a beeswax and mineral oil finish, sometimes this other product I can't remember the name of made from flax oil.
I've been wondering why jojoba oil doesn't get mentioned more in these discussions, either in combination with something else or on its own? It's a wax but liquid at room temperature, and seems to be stable for a long long time, long enough at least that it would probably need some refinishing before it might go bad.
The problem with jojoba oil is that it doesn't polymerize or cure. It stays wet in the fibers. Nothing bad with that on wood that doesn't contact hot food and beverages.
But if you put wood treated with non-polymerized oil in a hot soup or if you pour hot tea into a cup finished with jojoba oil, the oil will get out of the fibers and into your hot liquid, the fiber will raise and the wood will start to feel rough after a few uses and start to get stained from your food and beverage.
53 comments
[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 71.8 ms ] threadWorks well for me
I want to enjoy the process of making the wooden utensil as much as I want to see the end result, hence my excuse to play with random metallic driers and resins.
Urushi is the name of the Japanese tree, Toxicodendron verniciflua (the genus formerly was named Rhus), and of the lacquer of which its sap is the main constituent.
The lacquer is also called urushiol (note, not urushoil), which is also the resinous substance found in other members of the Toxicodendron genus: T. radicans and T. rydbergii, or poison ivy; T. diversilobum and T. pubescens, poison oak; and T. vernix, poison sumac. The resinous oil is what causes allergic reactions.
Which finally gets to my point: What are the allergic affects of the tree, its raw sap, the liquid lacquer, and maybe for hypersenstive/reactive urushiol allergies, the finished lacquer?
I don't meant to be alarmist - people have been eating off urushi lacquer for centuries. I'm thinking more about working with it.
EDIT: For those interested in the scientific aspects of the resin, plants, and allergic reaction:
Aaron C. Gladman MD. Toxicodendron Dermatitis: Poison Ivy, Oak, and Sumac. Wilderness & Environmental Medicine vol 17 #2 (June 2006)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1580/pr31-05.1
Nothing wrong with that though, I like reading and watching people do the process and seeing them enjoy the calmness in doing dozens of layers over multiple days. Some end up with very beautiful shimmery brown wooden pieces [0] and I would love to own some of them. It's just not my style.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/shorts/j1YHhsHZOGk
Your shop looks great too. Others might enjoy folowing the link buried towards the bottom of the article.
Make sure you do water popping after finishing the carving and sanding process. It's what makes the difference between wood that catches your lips and wood that feels like ceramic. The process is simple: sand with 600 or 400 grit, whichever you have, then get all the wood wet with water (faucet is fine), let dry completely (hairdryer helps), sand again with 600/400 grit and repeat about 3 times until wetting the wood no longer makes it feel rough.
For the exterior and for cutting boards, I use a hard wax oil I make from linseed oil and beeswax. It's easy to prepare and I usually provide a small cup of it to whomever I'm gifting the cutting board.
I reuse small, glass jelly jars with screw-on metal lids, about 1/2 a cup in size. You do need to leave a layer of water on top, though, because otherwise the top layer will polymerize and leave a rubbery layer you have to remove the next time you use it.
To head off the people who will jump up-and-down calling me paranoid for not considering untreated printed works food safe, and accusing me of accusing them of poisoning family & friends (in some circles the discussion can get more cantankerous than the vi/emacs thing!): you keep using printed things for food without treatment if you like, and I won't judge, but I prefer to remain paranoid because if printed items were food safe it would be a selling point and I don't see any manufacturers using food based examples in their advertising.
https://www.finewoodworking.com/2024/10/10/the-best-food-saf...
Even for hobby work it’s not hard to get reasonable VOC protective gear or establish a fume extraction hood out of some cardboard and a cheap box fan next to a window in the shop space.
And the reason is exactly the finish. Metal and plastic spoons, forks, lids, etc. are nice and smooth and don't get in your way. Cheaply made wood or cardboards ones are rough and tacky.
Of course you could argue that from an environmental standpoint, that's not a bug but a feature: now I'm using even less disposable stuff (first, no plastic because it's been replaced by other stuff; and second also the replacements because I hate using them).
My spoons and cups feel more like warm textured ceramic. They are sanded to a high 600 grit, water popped multiple times to make sure the grain doesn't raise and the texture stays smooth, and finished with drying oils as you see in the article to keep the surface highly hydrophobic.
I really can't describe it in words, but everyone I know who tried eating with my wooden spoons and drank from my coffee cups, was pleasantly surprised of the feeling.
That's why most of my sales happen in person at local craft markets, because there, people can take the cup into their hand, they can feel the smoothness, and they can ask about the same things you are worried about.
All I can recommend is find a spoon carver in your area, or one that ships there, and try a hand carved eating spoon. I'm not saying it's better than metal, ceramic or plastic, it's just a different experience that some people enjoy.
I throw it in a bag and vacuum seal the spoon (with tung oil) for a day or two, then remove, wipe, and let cure for a month.
The resulting finish is largely dishwasher safe for a year or so before I have to reapply. Without the vacuum sealing stage, it doesn’t last as long.
Wood is great for serving spoons, I have some fancy French ones, you just never dishwash and every few months wipe down with grapeseed or canola oil.
For eating? Wood just is not a good material.
Of course, the article is about high end stuff, but I just want to put everything in the dishwasher. Which I presume you can't do with even the best coated high end utensils?
We also switched to wooden Cutting boards, I find them to be pretty annoying as they really go bad fast in the dishwasher and can be quite expensive. We just wash them with boiling water, a bit of soap every now and then.
Top Oil indeed seems very similar to what I did (hardwax, drying oils, driers) but half of it is still white spirit solvent, which I'm guessing will give it the same smell as Polyx.
The closest thing I found to what I want is Walrus Oil Furniture Butter (https://walrusoil.com/products/furniture-butter) but I didn't know about it at the time.
Highly-refined mineral oil is food-safe.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mineral_oil#Food_preparation
Why even use wood if you’re going to cover it in a layer of clear plastic?
I find it amusing that those who will use wood or "natural" (petroleum is also naturally occurring...) products for some sort of weird misguided eco-virtue-signaling, inevitably end up needing to basically reinvent the chemistry of finding an inert, durable material that brought us modern plastics. All these drying oils create a layer of polymerised material, which can be classed as plastic anyway. Waxes, regardless of source, attribute their properties to long hydrocarbon chains, just like polyethylene.
I'm of the same opinion as you, drying oil polymers are still plastic, it's just that their method of curing makes them look better on wood, most likely because of the very thin layer that remains at the surface, but also because of the polymer surface texture.
Every epoxy resin, even the more penetrant ones, end up looking like plastic on wood, not sure how else to describe it.
But in terms of chemistry, food safety and how inert they are, they are indistinguishable.
I'm also aware mineral oil is food safe, I was trying to say that it will leak into the hot food and not stay in the wood fibers, which renders the finish useless after just one use.
No, that is absolutely not the case.
This is very confused.
First, all wood finishes you can buy are food-safe once cured. They aren't allowed to be sold otherwise, at least in the US/Europe/et al.
If you are using them once heated, this is not always as true (and regulations vary a bit), but if we are talking about food prep/salad/you name it, they are all safe.
Heat wise, if we are talking about using it in boiling water to stir something, most finishes would be fine from a safety standpoint (not all can withstand this though).
As a general rule of thumb, if you aren't heating the wood above 200F, you aren't really going to get a finishes to release toxic fumes[1]
Second, as for solvents - smell is not everything. The HDI he mentions rubio having will not smell like anything until the concentration is way way way way too high. If you can smell it, you are in trouble. HDI is also much more dangerous than most solvents[2].
The oil is also a solvent.
Solvents are just things that you can dissolve something else in.
If they want to avoid certain types of solvents for some reason, that should be about safety or something, and if they want to evaluate that, smell is probably the wrong evaluation criteria.
To give one example of solvent elimination with a purpose, let's take VOC's, which are about pollution[3].
Avoiding VOC solvents makes for cleaner air, but again, VOC compliant/exempt/etc solvents vary wildly in whether they are safer for people or not than non-VOC exempt solvents.
If you are trying instead to avoid human-toxic solvents, you would choose a different set, etc.
[1] There are so many finishes with so many different properties that i can't 100% guarantee this, but non-professional stuff you can buy at a woodworking store or a big box store is going to be fine
[2] The lack of smell of isocyanate's is main the reason you can get service life indicating respirator catridges from 3m/et al - otherwise you would not be able to determine if your cartridge is working or not, since you would not smell it when spray finishing/etc until the concentration is way too high, even if your cartridge is spent. Sane folks just use supplied air anyway, rather than risk it at all.
[3] not safety to humans, though often highly confused with being safer.
Standard BLO is not food-safe and is sold everywhere.
So if you are using that as a wood finish, you get what you get?
Also most of it is still food safe when cured anyway, it just does't always fully cure and it's hard to tell when it's cured.
But once the polymerization/etc has actually finished, there are no oxidizing agents or driers or ... left.
If you look at the law suits that lead to it being labeled the way it is, it's not about food safe when cured, it's about the inability to tell when curing actually finished, and final curing taking a very long time.
- most finishes are indeed "food safe after curing", I'm aware of that. How they look on wood, how they perform when being dipped in hot soup or when drinking hot liquids from them, that's harder to assess without buying cans of finish that I have to store forever if I don't like them.
- HDI doesn't smell indeed, I never said it did. In fact two-component hardwax oils would have been perfect if it was easier to mix and apply in small quantities. Unfortunately for the few drops of oil I need on a spoon, it's too messy
- I'm talking about solvents in the definition that most consumers know about them: volatile solvents that usually smell strongly. I used low-VOC solvent-based finishes and they still smell. Organic components aren't the only smelly things in solvents, and I simply can't stand them anymore, that's all. It's not all about the dangers, it's for my own comfort.
If you can point me to a solvent-based hardwax oil that smells of only the oils and waxes inside, I'll buy it in a pinch and forget about melting waxes in my microwave. Google search doesn't help here, I need to hear it from someone with experience
I prefer to keep the original color of the wood I sell, so lower temperatures are better for me, but I like the look of toasted wood as well.
My problem with just oil is that the finish is very matte, hence the wax and resin complication I'm going through in the article. But matte is also a look that people look for so there's no problem in that, it's just my personal preference and style that's different.
Generally I use a beeswax and mineral oil finish, sometimes this other product I can't remember the name of made from flax oil.
I've been wondering why jojoba oil doesn't get mentioned more in these discussions, either in combination with something else or on its own? It's a wax but liquid at room temperature, and seems to be stable for a long long time, long enough at least that it would probably need some refinishing before it might go bad.
But if you put wood treated with non-polymerized oil in a hot soup or if you pour hot tea into a cup finished with jojoba oil, the oil will get out of the fibers and into your hot liquid, the fiber will raise and the wood will start to feel rough after a few uses and start to get stained from your food and beverage.
I understand why you'd use a polymerizing oil for certain things; I guess I wonder about it as a substitute for mineral oil.