How Do I Dry The Mink Oil?

[Alex C Jones]

Hello, I am kind of a new amateur.

I am making some straps for some squeezeboxes. This is the first time I have worked with mink oil.

After cutting and punching holes in the pieces of leather, I treated all of the pieces with mink oil, and they don't seem to dry. I have been placing them on newspaper, and changing the newspaper twice a day for several weeks now, and still whenever I change the newspaper, there are still blotches of oil on the paper.

Once I assemble these straps and start using them, I do not want to end up getting oil spots on my shirts. So, I want to get these straps dry enough so they won't do that. They no longer get my hands oiling when I handle them, but they still get the paper oily after lying on the paper for hours.

Is there some way to get the oil to dry faster? Like maybe baking the pieces in the oven for a certain amount of time at a certain temperature?

Thanks.

[TomG]

What kind of leather and what type mink oil?

I've used the Camp Dri Mink Oil Paste and not had that experience.

Sounds like you are over doing the oil or oiling an oily piece of leather.

[Alex C Jones]

What kind of leather? The raw pink kind. Here is a scrap showing what it kind of looked like before applying the oil:

The type of mink oil is Fiebing's Mink Oil Liquid. The instructions say: "Apply Mink Oil freely and work into leather." So, I put the cut and punched untreated leather strips into a plastic zip-lock bag, covered them with the liquid mink oil, closed the bag, and rolled it around until I had immersed every part of every piece, and they all became a nice uniform brown.

This is what they look like now:

(There are actually 3 types of pieces)

Maybe the way I applied it was too "freely", but I don't want to start over again. They look nice now, and a lot less oil appears on the newspaper after 12 hours each time, so I am making progress. But I'd like to do something that just gets them dry soon, so I can finish assembling them this weekend.

Thanks

Edited July 31, 2015 by Alex C Jones

[TomG]

Yeah. WAY too freely. I usually put oils on lightly with a small rag. I'm not a pro at this, but the only thing I've ever seen soaked in oil were some reins,

Search the forums for NFO or Neatsfoot oil for lots of info on how to use it.

Maybe some others will chime in here, but the only thing I can think of it to use some absorbent rags or cloths and keep wiping until it's as dry as you can get it. Oil doesn't really "dry" like water would. It more or less absorbs into stuff or rubs off, in my experience.

Hmm.. Maybe get some old cotton towels from Goodwill and lay the strips between some layers of the towels and lay some heavy books on top? or something else sort of heavy?

Good luck on it.

[cgleathercraft]

Could try sweating it out by putting them in your vehicle wrapped up in towels or newspaper.

[Northmount]

You can bury the items in cornstarch or kitty litter or floor-dry and allow it to absorb the excess oil. Might take several days, may have to shake it up to put new absorbent against the leather. Searches here for over oiling, neatsfoot oil, etc. will lead you to similar information.

Tom

[mlapaglia]

Try Corn starch or regular oatmeal. Both adsorb oil. It will take a few days and you need to move them around in the oatmeal/cornstarch every 12 hours or so. If you use kitty litter you want a clay kind not the type that clumps. You are going to need a LOT of what ever you choose.

Going forward, Ignore any instructions that say to apply freely when it comes to oils. neats foot oil is a lot better than mink oil for leather. If you want something as dark as your straps are now I would use a dye.

FYI mink oil has excellent waterproofing qualities, thats why they tell you to apply freely. Im sure there are others here that will speak in defense of mink oil but personally I stick to neatsfoot oil.

Welcome to the club. Ill bet everyone of us as done something that totally messed up a project. Sometimes you can fix it sometimes you can not. The most important thing it to learn from your mistake and move on.

Im sure if you pend enough time on this project you can save it. But look at how long that takes vs starting over.

Hang in there.

Michael

[Alex C Jones]

Thanks everyone!

Cornstarch might work better than newspaper, which is what I have been using until now. Okay, I have just grabbed a can of cornstarch from the shelf and am using all of it for a few straps now.

Maybe tomorrow, I will get a larger can and take care of the rest.

[Alex C Jones]

Hi everyone.,

Letting you all know how this turned out. I actually read all of the replies. Several mentioned cornstarch, and one, by Northmount mention "Floor-dry". So in addition to getting more cornstarch at the grocery store, I went to the hardware store and got something called "Oil-Dri", which comes in a 10lb bag for $4, and look a lot like kitty litter. I put half of the straps in cornstarch and the other half were buried in a container of the Oil-Dri, for almost a week.

All of them came out less oily that when they started, but the ones in the Oil-Dry were noticeably lighter. So, I put the ones that had been in the cornstarch in the Oil-Dri for a week That might have been too much. I had to compare them with a scrap of the original to make sure that I had not completely dried them out. I re-oiled them a little, but this time NOT by immersion. I just put a few drops on a rag and wiped down just the shiny side. I could see the new layer of oil quickly get absorbed into the leather. I did that few times.

So here is what they looked like then. Lying across is a sample scrap of untreated leather for comparison.

Not shown are some smaller pieces that I put only in cornstarch and never in the oil-dri.

Here is the final product after assembling them and fastening the rivets:

Thanks everyone!

For anyone else with the same issue, remember that cornstarch works okay, but oil-absorbent such as Oil-Dri works much faster.