CraigEster
New in Town
- Messages
- 34
- Location
- Tampa, FL
When it's done I'll do a before-and-after post with images I've taken in the same place under the same lighting. Some of the bits of the hat are in a hat box because they're fragile. The hat itself is also a source of frustration at the moment, as most of the more intensive repairs are.
Shellac is a wonderful material and it is also something that takes a lot of time to master, if it is even possible to reach a level of mastery with it. The wonderfully firm and rigid hats we have today are molecularly cross-linked from age and the unique properties of the "coodle" recipes used in the past. I'm working on this area of research but it is slow and highly technical.
Anyway, shellac takes a long time to cure. Shellac actually goes through three phases of drying:
1) being dry to the touch or seemingly dry, which takes anywhere from a half hour to a few hours
2) being seeming firm, which can take a day or two when used as a stiffener
3) being actually dry, which takes a month or more
4) curing, which is molecular cross-linking caused by various factors
The last stage is why very old damage is far harder to repair - the shellac has a shape memory in that broken position. Compared to fixing that, new damage is a dream to fix. However, with the extreme damage that taller hat went through, there's no easy route to a full repair.
