My badger hair brush is such a great brush, but I can’t seem to find another one. I looked at the brush that’s on Tools for Working Wood, ox hair, bit it’s a little over $100 which is a little too rich for me. The badger brush lays down a really nice level coat with no streaks. Can you suggest another brush that you use that works just as well. If there is really nothing out there and this is the only option, then maybe that second job at McDonalds is still available. Thanks for the help.
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Replies
Google is your friend (hard to believe I'm typing this phrase in 2024/25):
https://www.google.com/search?q=badger+hair+brush+for+varnish&oq=badger+hair+brush+for+varnish&gs_lcrp=EgZjaHJvbWUyBggAEEUYOTINCAEQABiGAxiABBiKBTINCAIQABiGAxiABBiKBTINCAMQABiGAxiABBiKBTIKCAQQABiiBBiJBTIKCAUQABiABBiiBDIKCAYQABiABBiiBNIBCDcwNDlqMGo3qAIAsAIA&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8
I agree google is good resource but this forum is better in so many ways and Dr. Google in todays world is not your friend - no disrespect meant, I understand what you were relaying, but I wouldn’t click on 80% of the links it returns for almost any search even with DuckDuckGo and private tab, the bad guys are real.
Is badger the absolute best for shellac? Is it that much better than hog bristle from Lee Valley at 1/5 price that it’s worth it? I’ve never brushed shellac - I use a rag. It’s on my list to get my sprayer up and running. Does brushing speed things up and allow fewer coats than an old t-shirt wrapped cheese cloth applicator or is this like asking pins vs. tails?
If using a brush is good enough for cabinetmaker David Lamb it’s good enough for me.
I posted the link because you can't buy a brush on Fine Woodworking.
You mentioned that you wanted a badger hair brush and that you were having a hard time finding them. You stated: "My badger hair brush is such a great brush, but I can’t seem to find another one."
I assumed that you needed another badger hair brush.
The Google link shows them available from a variety of reputable vendors and at different price points and configurations.
I can't help you if you're afraid of the internet. You're here, so, who knew?
Type "buy badger hair brush" into whichever search engine gets your rocks off. You'll get the same links as the Google search. Insert "varnish" or "paint" somewhere in the search string and you might avoid links for badger hair shaving brushes.
Except the person who made the original post is not the person "afraid" of the internet, they're 2 different people. The original poster didn't say a word about not using the internet.
Charlie pointed out the badger hair brushes that I use for varnishing oil based varnishes, they are awesome and almost eternal. Yes, they are that much better, unfortunately, they are also extinct. The Redtree so called badger brushes are made of hog bristle according to their site and every other badger hair manufacturer also ads badger-like or badger-style bristle to their description. I still have two old true Redtree real badger brushes and use them for final coats of thick Spar varnishes on boat parts. https://www.redtreeind.com/brushes/fine-finish-natural-bristle-paint-brushes/badger
Don Williams has written on his WebSite about using artist 1” mop brushes for applying shellac. Think of it like a cambered blade on a hand plane to help prevent shellac tracks. I went to Michael’s and got one that felt soft in 1” size. It works wonderfully and my shellac finishes are better because of it. I own the Tools For Working Wood shellac brushes and prefer the mop style artist brush and I think I paid under $20 for mine and I’ve been using it for three or four years.
I would check at marine supply stores. Varnishing on yachts is a never ending task, and for a $20 million dollar boat, they are not using throw-away brushes.
Purdy, Redtree, Corona all make decent brushes in the $30 - $40 dollar range. I don't think you can get a real badger brush anymore, but I'm not sure your results would be any better if you had one.
Having said that, I also apply shellac with a rag. Perhaps you are using a heavier cut than I do. I prefer a thin cut that flashes dry quickly - I've never seen any application marks from shellac, like you would with varnish.
Apparently a firm named Da Vinci supplies the genuine article and they are, on their face, 'expensive.' I have no real definition for "expensive" in the context of woodworking. It's a damned expensive hobby in the first place. I have seen guys with a minimum mid-five figure investment in power and hand tools willing to risk a live project by squeezing the last day out of an expiring $15 bottle of liquid hide glue. There are some weird people in this world.
Otherwise, Da Vinci pops up in the general search, but more specifically when the term "genuine" is added to the search string.
Lol. Often I have 100 to 300 hours invested in a project by the time I am ready to glue it up. I toss out my bottles when they are a year old precisely because of this. For $15 I don't want to take any chances during glue up.
I remember a video somebody posted a while back on some forum that has some presumably well-meaning fellow standing in front of a Felder 12" sliding table saw doing the 'sticky finger' test to see if a bottle of hide glue was still good. Commercial Felder. One of the big boys in their line.
"I spent $15,000+ on this saw, but I'm getting every damn drop of glue out of this bottle, by God."
Please.
Maybe that's why he can afford a $15,000 table saw...
Could be. Would be a lovely bloke to be around I'm sure.
I've always used a taklon brush when brushing shellac - which isn't that often. Only when putting shellac on larger surfaces. This type of brush has super fine bristles that leave a smooth surface. You can find these bushes at artist supply stores.
Second Taklon brush although i usually use a cloth pad. Peter sellers uses hack brushes. Use what works for you
I found the brush Sellers uses drops hairs into the finish that are a pain to remove.
Interesting timing. Speaking of Tools for Working Wood, Joel has a new blog entry about exactly this topic, and the availability of Badger, Fitch and Oxhair brushes (and a new supply of the latter they just got in.
https://toolsforworkingwood.com/store/blog/joel
Badger hair comes from Korea or China. I don't mean colored or tipped hog bristle, I mean badger hair. Look in the art supplies on aliexpress for a badger hair brush, there are plenty there all the way up to huge blending brushes with silvertip hair.
There's no good reason to buy a badger hair brush made in the west when it uses $10 of Chinese badger hair and is marked to $150.
If you want fine tipped brushes, you'll need to look around as they're harder to find in badger. A large upper tier blending brush from China will be about $45. I use one for varnish, but generally for smaller work use taklon fine bristle smaller brushes, but I make the varnish and it is shorter molecule than something like epifanes before it cures meaning it can feel very thinned but still be 50% solids. Lower solids in shellac may make that tedious, for example, to be brushed on a cabinet with a 1 inch artists brush.
The bigger taklon brushes seem to lean towards hard thicker bristles, which I don't care for, and the split tip hog bristle brushes sold there and here are appalling for brushing shellac. A regular Purdy natural bristle paint brush is better for shellac than the hog brushes that cost two or three times more.
follow up to my post above. "art secret" is the brand printed on the brush that I have. It's china - so you and I have no idea if that's a brand or if the same brush is available with 10 different brands on it. It'll help you find one and narrow things down.
There are other animal hairs like squirrel, etc, I have tried them, but not really a great match to me. Better than hog bristle, I guess. it would be nice if someone would make a less thick brush that's not intended for loading or blending on a canvas that would gently and quickly brush out dead even nice coats of shellac.
I had the original TFWW ox ear hair brush or whatever - it never stopped dropping hairs. i could see most of them, but they didn't always come out at opportune times when you were brushing or second coat, or third or whatever before the shellac starts to draw and it's time to give up on it until it dries. The problem with my brush is it would drop hairs any time - if you brushed water with it, it would drop hairs and if they came out dead in line with grain, you may not see them until they're dry. after about 10 or 12 years of looking at that brush all the time and thinking about how much it cost and how useful it "should be", I finally threw it away last year. It was a fat little brush and half as much bristle with a more precise tip and bristles that didn't come out would've been nicer.
Varnish provides some relief (though it's harder to apply well) in that the solids levels can be so high that a 1 or 1 1/4" artists taklon brush is big enough to brush anything but really big furniture. If you have something flat where you're really laying it on, the blending brushes work well, but for anything other than that, the ones i'm mentioning above, to me, lay out too much at a time.
But, china direct, and artists supply more than woodworking supply is where you'll find badger. And it *is* really good - just not easy to say by default where you should get it.
Hi David, can you point us to a real Badger hair brush, the likes of the ones used for varnishing that can hold a lot of varnish and apply with minimal brush strikes, I’ve been to several artist stores (my wife is an artist painter) and Last week, while in Toronto, I setter on a can of brush cleaner to restore my old badger hair brushes, not a single true badger hair brush there either.
Search this on aliexpress, or on google with aliexpress added as a word to the search term:
"ArtSecret High Grade Big Brush 2530BS South Korean Badger"
I have the narrowest of the brushes on here. they are sort of an odd duck, but the hair on the brush is super. I would guess they have some use for artists using linseed oil paints, but it's not my area (art painting). Instead of being a cake of bristles like the TFWW brush, where the bristles eventually kind of bunch up and stick together, these will hold a bunch of varnish and you use the thing with lighter pressure and the varnish just sort of flows out. I haven't tried the brush with shellac.
I got acquainted with asia being the source of badger through shaving brushes. A "knot" for a shaving brush isn't that expensive, even in extremely high quality. if you find a western seller of badger brushes, a wood or plastic handle with a brand on it goes on, especially if there is some lineage, and the price goes through the roof (can be 10 times the cost of just going and buying the knot yourself). Knot just being a term in shaving of a plug of resin or something that the bristles are set in - it would be like buying a paint brush bristle set permanently set in, but then needing to make the rest of the brush and perhaps a ferrule on your own.
I can't respond to your last comment - it may be two levels deep. What brushes do you typically use on a boat? Also, out of curiosity, what is the thickness you're looking for? There are spar urethanes for consumer purchase, of course, and often recommended for furniture. they work, anything will work to some extent, but in the scheme of furniture varnishes of higher quality, they're not quite the same. For example, darkening with age, flexibility beyond the minimum needed, etc. This discussion is a little harder for me to gauge because I don't know of anyone making furniture with a true varnish that is designed for furniture. Varnish that's not polyurethane offers hard and tough at the same time in a one part brushed finish, but is it really as practical now as two part spray finishes that also often hardness and toughness? I'd guess no.
I don't know much about boats other than seeing the varnish laid on pretty heavy, which makes sense when it is a barrier against sun and possibly wear from things behind handled on the boat or feet, etc. the older varnish texts mention varnish being sprayed or laid on thickly in really short oil to get furniture out of the door, but with the expectation that the buyer knows the finish wouldn't have a long life. A really short varnish might be 10 parts resin to 1 oil - it's not what we think of as a varnish - resin was cheaper than refined oil at the time and the closer the finish is to just resin, the faster it would dry.
A badger brush works nicely on furniture with a natural resin varnish, but we are perhaps speaking different languages because it's laid on pretty thin and as evenly as possible.
Conceding on the fact that those brushes are aimed at people brushing oil finishes on art - long oil varnish and linseed oil paint aren't that far apart, but the use is different.
Perhaps the obvious answer is to take care of the brush you have.
I have a brush that I use exclusively for varnish and I've had it for at least fifteen years. I've never quite mastered using two brushes at the same time but were I ever to acquire this rather interesting skill, I might look for another.
what varnish are you brushing in quantity? Epifanes? Waterlox?
"In quantity?" Usually three or four projects a year. TotalBoat.
I can't claim to live with a varnish brush in my hand, and I assume the OP can't either.
I'd like to meet the person who does. Well, outside of boats. The world of boat stuff (lay it on thick, cross and tip) is different from furniture.
I would imagine varnishing furniture was more like laying on thinner uniform coats and sanding once in a while as the real stuff can do weird things on edges and corners. Epifanes is gooey if not thinned far and stinks, too.
No experience with totalboat, and most things with varnish on them now will say somewhere on the can that they are now urethane (one of totalboat's went that way - presumably they have the real stuff). Last - and one I do have on hand, there's an inexpensive very fast drying varnish at S-W made by minwax. "performance series". It brushes well, dries really fast....never gets suitably hard for furniture. Too bad.
Doesn't address the OP's original issue, though - what will lay down shellac nicely. Mack Headley can lay down shellac like magic with a brush, but the only footage I have of him doing it gives no data on what the brush is. The expensive oxhair brush was a zero for me and soft paint brushes do OK, sometimes $6 or $8 brushes with soft bristles do quite well - a lesson about relying only on hobby woodworking suppliers and just assuming something expensive will be good.
Been varnishing boats since I’m 10, not as a pro but my boats always had a lot of brightwork, both inside and out. You probably can get away with fewer coats on indoor furniture but the techniques are the same, the results are the same and the produits can be the same. Before the advent of water based poly, if I wanted a deep gloss look, I would go for 6 heavy coats of Spar varnish regardeless if its furniture or brightworks, don’t see why it would be différent and the true badger hair brushes were and still are a distinct davantage over the other brushes.
I looked at totalboat stuff briefly this morning. It appears to be urethane type finishes (polyurethane at least mentioned for one). The phenolic varnishes (phenolic is an inexpensive resin used for varnishes, but also stuff like printing inks) and who knows how complicated or whatever goes on beyond that for stuff like epifanes, etc, is at least in the west so little offered that maybe the need for a varnish brush in general doesn't matter. It's more like what brush is good for polyurethane. A true varnish that isn't long oil / soft is a pretty different experience.
Follow up to my comments on the badger brushes, especially the big blending brush aimed at artists. I have been brushing varnish if anything the last couple of years and generally using shellac only in turnings to go quick over oil and then under carnauba.
The larger bristle area blending brushes, now that I've got a near mixed batch of 2lb cut shellac- I think they depend on finish string to stay in the brush without just falling out. As in, the varnishes and oil paints if they are good will have the tension to stay in a brush without cakey super dense bristles, but just fanning the brush in my hands, not so sure and will report back. I think shellac is just too runny. If you're brushing thicker than a two pound cut, you're kind of out of my territory - I'd build french polish with a 3lb cut but not too much else.
There must be a myriad of soft type synthetic brushes now that aren't that expensive that would do a good job of not leaving rows in shellac when brushing. I guess unless i find a surprise brushing, that's an endorsement for the silvertip type badger $50 chinese brushes that are probably bordering on $200 from western brand names - just doesn't seem like the right vehicle for a runny finish that will then flash off fast.