jar, if you are coming to NC, which i think you have mentioned there are tons of long needle pines around.
thanks riderofwaves,
i’m still coming to NC in the next 3 weeks, but i doubt i will have the time to play with wax.
i have the recipy now… i’ll get to it eventually. heard from my brother that the waves were pretty good a few days ago.
i hope you had the chance to enjoy them.
-jar
Good stuff guys.
I expect to see plenty of updates on this thread in time to come 
Surfed on just pure beeswax today and wiped out on almost every wave that offered a lip to whack. Ate it on a few bottom turns too. I caught one set wave and my friend was on the shoulder pretending to try to drop in while the wave offered up a perfect opportunity to spray him. I hit the lip and was bringing the board around when my back foot slipped off and I went skipping and rag dolling. My friend was completely cracking up and said I looked like a leaf blowing in the wind.
Next up is to strip the wax and re wax with regular wax. I’ll add coconut oil at a latter date.
After checking with the manufacturer that it didn’t contain anything else than pine tree resin, I bougth the colophony today and prepared some wax. The pine stuff comes as a sort of powder (small flakes) and it mixes very well with the wax. I used the following recipe : 60gr of pure bees wax (I had to filter it to remove the many impurities), 20gr of hydrogenated coconut oil and 20gr of colophony.
I just tried the wax on a small part of a board and my first conclusions are that the colophony makes it very very sticky. This wax is probably in fact too sticky for french winter water temp. I reminds me of the terra wax (too soft and sticky for my taste), except for the golden color and the nice smell of honey (if you live in alaska, that could lead to other problems !!!).
I’ll try the wax on my next session but I think the next one will have less colophony. Wax+oil were too hard and slippery for me but it seems that wax+oil+resin are the way to go. It’s only a matter of finding the right balance between each ingredient.
I think more coconut oil means a softer wax, more resin means a stickier wax. Therefore, once you find the % of resin that suits you, you just adjust the % of oil according to water temp.
thanks for the reviews of your home made wax guys…
keep them coming!
-jar
I used Roy 3 parts bees wax, 1 part coconut oil, 1 part pine resin right to the recipe. You can’t use a dubble boiler because 100 C. is not hot enough. You need to keep working at it, remember melt wax add resin mix until the resin melts then add the coconut oil. You can use most any type of resin from a tree it does not have to be pine, Roy says fresh is better then hard, but I have found that the hard works great. I have quit a few bars that I have made, you have to start with this wax if you try to add it over the top of another wax it does not work very well at all. I’m using it in NorCal so the water is quit cold, if you are in wormer water just use less resin.
Does anyone know where i can find a relatively cheap source for pine resin…the very few places that i found online were deadends.
Mahalo,
Ryan Edwards
Have you tried to search under “rosin” or “colophony” ?
I see you’re into the professional wax business, if you need big volumes, you could try to contact these guys : http://www.drt.fr/en.html
Their business is to manufacture products out of pine tree resin.
James townsen and sons brewer’s pitch goes for $12/lb
Quote:
Does anyone know where i can find a relatively cheap source for pine resin…the very few places that i found online were deadends.
Mahalo,
Ryan Edwards
$12 per pound is much to expensive…it seems like there should be a wholesale dealer somewhere out there who sells large quantities of pine resin for somewhere around $3-6 per pound…its just plain weird how there isn’t.
Thank you for the info though
Hi everyone,
I’ve recently got hooked on creating my own eco wax. I’ve been following Roy’s recipe as a base starter and have been having the same problems a few of you guys have. I’ll write you some pointers on where I am right now:
- Wax is too thin for my liking. I’d like to give it more texture, so as to bump easier. Anyone has any ideas ?
2., I still haven’t found the right percentage of wax to coconut oil to Rosin. I’ve been making 100g bars and do a 3-1-1. I’ve been varying this formula but either get a very hard wax difficult to scrub or I get a very slippery and oily wax.
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After researching other Eco waxes, I’ve read of people using more ingredients such as minerals, clays or plant saps. I read Matunas is composed of Natural Clay,Beeswax,Coconut Oil, Jasmin, Raspberries and Honey (how do you use jasmin and raspberries in the formula ? Do you think he means essential oils ?) . I have tried mixing clay in with the melted wax, but have had no luck. I’ve tried mixing clay in as a paste and it is unmixable with the wax, ie it doesn’t dissolve. And I have tried adding clay in powder form to the wax where it hardens and becomes impossible to scrape on your board.
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I’d be interested if anyone tried using propolis in their formula ? I’ve been reading up on it, but haven’t found a local supplier of pure propolis yet.
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My next step will be to create a sugar paste from sugar and lemon juice (women use it for waxing as a substitute for wax) to mix it in with the beeswax. The paste when solid, is quite hard and very sticky. I’m curious how it will come out.
I’ll let you guys know how it went. In the meanwhile, I’d like to keep this post alive and hear any other wild experiments from anyone else ?
All the best,
SMR
Tried Famous’ Green Wax. Me no likey. Too smeary, couldn’t get it to bump up properly.
Roy says not to change the ratio of bees wax to Cocconut oil. You can play with the pine rosin but keep the beeswax to cocconut oil at 3 to 1. Roy claims that his wax does not bump up, but it does not need to since it is sticky enough with out the bumps. If you want bumps you will need to find some thing to add to the wax to make it bump up. ???
I have found a supply or rosin at a real good price, but mininum order is 25Kg. I have not picked up any of this rosin so I can not say if it will work for surf wax or not. I have tried Red Gum, or Yaccua rosin. It kinda worked. I tried cherry pitch right off the tree but it was a bust. If there is anyone that would like to go in with me on a 25Kg bag of rosin let me know, I’m in Santa Cruz CA.
If you promise to treat the trees well, you can tap your own resin very easily. Do some research on tapping mapples (for syrup)—the same goes for just about any tree species. Importantly, don’t tap anything thinner than 30cm (12")
i too have been playing around over the past few months and trialling it with friends.
my main aims for doing this are not purely financial… by this i mean i want to stop having to buy wax where possible.
i started with the above ratios of beeswax to cocunut oil and pine resin. i made a few variations and tried them all out, it worked better with more of the resin but it was harder to melt down and absorb more resin.
i didnt get round to making any for a while but i had a pan with about 2 bars worth of mix in my camper one weekend down the coast when a few of my mates wanted to rewax their boards so we scraped their boards clean, added it to the mix, heated then skimmed off the crap and cooled before reapplying, i still ended up with about 2 bars of wax, our boards were rewaxed, nothing had gone into landfill and no-one had spent any money… if it had been a sunny day it could have even been carbon neutral!
try it anyhow, let me know what u think
dog
That’s another good Eco Suggestion. Recycle your own wax !
How did you all like the wax, Dog?
I still haven’t made any from Roy’s recipe yet (got all my ingredients waiting), but have had great success with Treehugger wax (all natural, no petrochemicals). Will post on my success with the roy recipe soon I hope…
were loving it cheers matt, in fact the guy who got the first attempt as a little present for his birthday a while back is getting married this coming weekend near where we surf so im cooking up another batch as we speak… there’ll be about 20 of us surfing from weds to mon so ill let you know the feedback!
dog