Using Wax Paper as a Woodworking Tool Lubricant
George VondriskaDescription
Woodworking is more fun and satisfying when your tools are well-maintained and in good working condition. Many woodworkers suggest that one of the more important aspects of tool maintenance is to apply a tool lubricant to parts that maintain contact with your piece. When it comes to choosing a good tool lubricant, there are many options to choose from. Some woodworkers use car wax, which is a proven product for protecting against moisture, and most woodworkers have a stash of this available as they also use it to make their cars more beautiful. A word of caution: many car waxes contain silicone which can interfere with the project’s ability to accept finish. That means that car wax is not necessarily a great tool lubricant. Another approach, which does not include silicone, is to apply a furniture paste wax to the tool. Still a third option is to purchase a specialized tool lubricant spray.
Furniture wax and dedicated tool lubricant are good options, and we strongly recommend using them, but these products take time to apply, and sometimes you just want to “touch up” the protection. So what can you do?
Apply wax paper between applications. Keep a roll of wax paper available, and apply it as shown in the video to improve the slickness of a tool’s surface. This is not likely to add any effective moisture resistance, but it will enhance the usability of the tool.
Other uses as well. In addition to using wax paper as a tool lubricant, you might find it useful for other applications as well, such as transferring holes used for mounting hardware.
I am a huge advocate, as you may already know, of keeping your shop tools lubricated so that they move better, they work better, everything about it is better and here's a down and dirty way, if you find that you don't have the aerosol tool-specific lubricant that we often talk about, here's a way that you can keep your tools moving. And that's by just running to the kitchen and stealing a little wax paper. And oddly enough, wax paper, of all crazy things, has wax on it. So if you take that and you kind of ball it up and you run it across the surface, like that, we're migrating a little bit of the wax from the surface down onto the router base. We could do the same thing over here on our plunge tubes. And that is a really easy way to make sure that your tools are lubed up. It's gonna keep them sliding better across the surfaces. Just, in general, make them more pleasant to use by just using the little wax paper to keep it going.
What about some wax from the router base being transferred to the wood and interfering with finishing?