Oil for Varnish

I've been playing with oil for making some varnish. I can buy good varnish, but once you have tried to make it, and had some minor success; the process is stuck in you, an you want to try it again to see if you can do better. The same is true about violin making. The same is true about every aspect of your life; even the spiritual. I've been washing the oil, and then clarifying it in a pan until the water is all out. It gets it darker, but it is still clear. I'm trying to get it to go redder, buy washing it in different things. The oil is just boiled linseed oil from Home Depot. That is the jar on the right. As you can see it isn't the pristine stuff that you would put on a salad! It looks fairly nasty.

With some backlighting it show some promise though.

They are arrainged from light to dark on the left. When I look at them in the light, there is a difference in color, and darkness. The photos don't show so much.

The lightest.

The next lightest.

The second darkest.

The darkest one.

I have some raw pine resin, and fir resin on order, so once that stuff comes in I can cook some varnish up. I never know exactly how to measure the parts. How is the oil I have now measured? It isn't quite pristine; I'm sure it has less volume than it started at. Same with the resin. The hard resins are easy to weigh, but how much water is still in raw gum. I'll try the Keith Hill method for the raw gum.

Now, here is the plain oil out of the can washed with water, and sat overnight. The oil itself seems to be hydroscopic, it doesn't act like the nice oil on Tad Spurgeons site.

So, I have to cook it in a pan, and boil out the water. It made a lot of yellow foam, and bubbled like crazy for a while. I but it on the heat until it bubbles, then swirl the pan off the heat until the bubbles stop. They were pretty much ending and I took a measurement of the temperature. 260 degrees F. It looks like this:

With back lighting it is the lightest of all, but still redder than it was before.

I want a dark varnish in as small a thickness as possible. We will see.