Monday, October 7, 2013

The horse dung (and urine) experiment, part 2.

The mare with the fitting French name: "La Loire" obviously got fed up with me always lurking around with a small bucket handy, so she decided to cooperate in the hope of ending this seemingly ongoing experiment.

Without any harm I managed to acquire a full load of horse pee, approximately 1 L (1/4 gallon).

My wife witnessed the "happy moment" so the World shall know that there has been no cheating in this experiment.

In front of a camera I poured the liquid over the dung, and behold.. A reddish liquid soon after emerged in the lower bucket.

Now I'll let it wait for a couple of days more to extract any more liquid,  before testing the stain out on some sample boards.

At a point, I thought that Roubo might have had to use buckets made out of iron, so that the stain was merely rusty water, so that will still be my excuse if it does not work very well on the sample boards. Theoretically Roubo could also have used ceramics or other types of pottery, but I guess that an iron bucket was the common at that time.

Success is just around the corner.

Concentration.

This will probably never be a popular recipe for a stain.

The level of stain is rising in the lower bucket.


11 comments:

  1. Wow. I thought I was dedicated to the craft. Jonas, you take first prize.

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  2. I'm sorry, Jonas, but you look way too happy to be doing that :)

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  3. It's the second weirdest thing in woodworking I've ever heard of. The weirdest is that someone found out it would work in the first place!

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    1. Jonas should have just waived his wand...

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  4. I guess we are having more fun on this side of the atlantic :-)

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  5. I guess this is a classic comment usually heard in a bar:
    "My wife doesn't understand me!"

    I guess is it kind of weird to look that happy when doing what I was doing, but an experiment that works for the greater benefit of mankind can spark feelings like that :-)

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  6. That is freakin amazing, Jonas. Thank you for your inspiring bravery.

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  7. I have made a test of the stain, I am waiting for the test boards to dry, then I'll make a review.
    Brgds
    Jonas

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  8. I recently watched a television show about medieval Europe and it turns out one of the main ingredients in clothing dye was human urine!

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  9. The horse urine looks remarkably cloudy, compared to human urine. Probably a lot of minerals and proteins and such, compared to person pee...?


    --GG

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  10. It is also a lot thicker, but the funny thing is that horse dung is a very low fertilizer, i.e. there isn't much bang for the buck in a volume of horse dung compared to e.g. cow dung. I haven't got any idea if it is the opposite with the pee? Perhaps I should have paid more attention in biology class..
    But I can assure you it is fresh from the source.. The picture is taken maybe 5 minutes after I "harvested" the stuff, so it is not cloudy because it is old.
    Brgds
    Jonas

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