The Framers Forum

hello Guys,

I saw many Russian videos talking about the Compo Recipe they used it in wood decor elements and ornaments but they make this modelling paste from sawdust or wood dust not from calcium carbonate ..

i had searched for the recipe and i didn't find it yet ...

i hope the professionals here in the forum help me and write the exact ingredients

plz help me

It sounds to me like it's some sort of recipe for what is known as wood pasta. There is not just one recipe for wood pasta, but probably many. Ground up wood dust is the main bulk filler ingredient in most of these recipes and there will be also a binding ingredient. In most cases, the binding ingredient is capable of being softed by heat to allow the wood pasta to pressed into a mould.

One such binder might be colophony resin which is the resinous substance that is found in some types of pine wood. I think a lot of the recipes for stuff like this a probably well kept trade secrets, so you make have to experiment and create you own recipe. The colophony resin will almost certainly need another ingredient to ensure that it does not become too hard and brittle when the resin cools to a normal temperature.

I have experimented with making this from sawdust (of which I have unlimited supplies ) without much success.
A my learned friend above says, you can use a resin as a binder, but it tends to set too hard and brittle. You used to be able
to buy the stuff ready-made and I had a tub that I used for years. The solvent was Acetone and when the stuff in the tub went
solid I would literally saw chunks off and revitalise it by putting it in a jar with some acetone for a day. Alas, I failed to find any
on the market today.
The missing link is finding a binder or an additive that gives the mixture a slight 'rubberyness' for want of a better word.

Sorry for lame answer.

Peter and myself have spoken a fair bit about this in the past and both of us pretty much think much the same about this and the problem pretty much always comes down to the same key problems, which are, suitable solvents, adding flexibility and using the right binder. The binder used in making a wood filler is not likely to be the same as a binder for lumps of wood pasta, which need to be heated and pressed into a mould to make framing ornamentation.

If I mas intending to make wood pasta, I think that the basis for my own recipe would be something like this:- hard pellets of bee's wax, boiled linseed oil, colophonoy resin (or, perhaps Rosin) and saw dust. The proportions would be at this stage, by trial and error. I'm not bad at working out stuff like this, but there's not much stuff like this made anymore, for health and safety reasons.

I would expect to add most of the ingredients in a sauce pan on an electric hot plate and then add the wood dust while the contents were still hot. Get it too hot and you've got a fire! It's best heated and mixed up outdoors and in the open air, in sensibly small quantities. If it catches fire, the quantity you have been mixing is unlikely to be fit for anything!

The only thing I can think of is to substitute the chalk in compo with sawdust. The resultant mix will be a lot coarser and perhaps a bit stickier to use, but the effect should be the same. There is a compo recipe somewhere on the forum, type compo into the search box and search back a bit.
The synthetic pasta that used be available, ref to Prospero, was kept plastic by the addition of acetone. It was some sort of mix of resin, oil, glue and sawdust, so you might try to experiment there.

I'm kind of glad that I bought some of Lion's last stocl of wood pasta decorative ornanamentations, when they were being cleared as discontinued and reduced to clear. I got them as I wanted to make some little pediment frames, with a little decoration on the pediments and with the lock down being lifted and me working towards re-opening, I'll have something quite interesting to make for the shop window.