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What Hacker News says
- Regarding finishes, I highly, highly recommend the book Understanding Wood Finishing by Bob Flexner. Flexner applies a very no-nonsense scientific approach which greatly demystifies the process. For example he explains what that pre-stain conditioner actually is (chemically), what it achieves (with photos), and exactly when you would want to use it. There is a lot of marketing and folklore around wood finishing which makes it a lot more confusing than it is, and this book helps cut through all of that.
- Flexner's "Understanding Wood Finishing" has a section about "the myth of food safety" that pretty directly states that food safety isn't a serious concern for fully cured finishes.
- Paint, as understood by oil painters and artists, sounds like a slightly different animal than paint as understood by house painters, wood finishers, and other sorts of people with more prosaic requirements of their paints.
Bob Flexner wrote a book for wood finishers, Understanding Wood Finishing, that breaks down oil paint in simple terms for the rest of us:
Some oils (like linseed and walnut) are drying oils, and can be used as a finish on their own, but don't really form a hard film finish.
For that you need a varnish, which is an oil cooked with a resin.
Paint is a varnish with a pigment added.
That's different from an oil mixed with a pigment mentioned in the article, which is probably fundamentally similar to a straight oil in terms of its properties. Maybe somebody who paints with oil paints can weigh in?
His columns in Popular Woodworking and other woodworking magazines are worth a read, as is his book, if you're interested in understanding what you're really working with.
Tying this all back to the article, I'd disagree with the claim that paint is "colored glue". One typically doesn't glue things together with paint, though that is a sometimes unintended consequence of putting something on top of something else with an incompletely cured layer of finish. You certainly couldn't use e.g. linseed oil as a glue in a joint where oxygen isn't getting in readily like a mortise and tenon joint.
A discussion of oil vs varnish here:
https://www.popularwoodworking.com/techniques/finishing/oil-...
