natural abrasives from plants

[Dave B]

I ran across an interesting note in the Chambers Jeager book  Steinschloss-Jagerbuchsen. The author talked about the use of horse tail plant ( Equisetum ) the stocks are tied in a bundle und dried by heating on a iron plate. The pant stalks evidently have a high silica content and can be used to sand a gun stock. No details on how you go about using the abrasive ie charging a stick with the abrasive. In my industry we have used German products for our routers for finishing prosthetics. One of the devices is a felt arbor that is charged with a abrasive that is bonded to the felt with a special primer(glue) of some sort. The mixture is quite durable un less you get heavy handed. When I first started in the field the instructor had us make a sanding stick with ortho-felt glued on to the wood. This was then wrapped with a sheet sand paper. It would not have been much different to apply the primer to the stick, apply the abrasive and off you go.  The late John Bivins talked about the use of sanding sticks for cleaning up around the fine moldings and carving on excessively swirly grained stocks. He used sections of tongue depressors or Formica gluing portions of wet and dry on to special shapes for touch up.

[tiswell]

 Dave,
      Years ago I was into making wood bow. There was a guy that was a master bowyer and even made bows using only stone tools and natural  plants. He used stone hand axes to cut ash saplings, split it with antler wedges and worked the wood green to close to finished size and shaped with stone tools. When the wood was ready for final smoothing he used horsetail rush also called ghost whistle.  I know it grows near wet areas in the Mid-Atlantic area where I live. He would hold several dried rushes in a clump and rub the wood as needed.

[rich pierce]

I've also used horsetail as a very fine abrasive.  I'd say it is 600 grit or finer.  I partially dry the stalks, flatten them and hold them at 90 degrees to the "sanding" stroke.  It's almost more burnishing than sanding.

[Robert Wolfe]

Another name for horsetail (Equisetum) is "scouring rush."

[Dave B]

Robert, I read a little on a google search and there is information about it being used to scrub out pots and pans in colonial times. The Scouring rush is right. Good stuff to know.

[tiswell]

Slightly off topic, but sharkskin is more coarse and works well.

[ddoyle]

ditto on the 'shark' it was an industry in this province at one time to convert dog fish into fine wood working/industrial abrasive. Now we just convert them into deep fry fodder for brit chip stands. couple hundred million tons and not a stitch of sandpaper Japanese craftsmen use it IIRC. same fish migrates betwixt here and there.

was there a polishing use for hemlock bark dust? or is it just a flea/louse repelant...... gotta stop chewing these RBs.

[David R. Pennington]

They had bundles of horse tail rush for sale in the store at the Fort I noticed when we were there Saturday.

[BOB HILL]

Some sutlers use to carry pot scrubbers made of them at Rev. War events...... Bob