How do you make brushes?

[Jeff Gorman]

Try to get a copy of 'Brushmaking By Hand' by A Tebbs, Wheatland Journals Ltd, long out of print, and reported to be rare, but a search might find it.

This seems to be mostly about paint brushes, but it might help a bit http://tinyurl.com/6rcs5s

I think that the principal problem would be getting the materials in small quantities, especially if you want to use natural materials with the wooden backing.

Also, for a decent job you'll need some brushmaker's shears and will need to make a jig for boring holes at the necessary angles.

Jeff
www.amgron.clara.net

 

[squib]

Nice little video in the Gramercy link Jeff, she certainly kows how to settle the bristles.

 

[wobblycogs]

Thought I'd chip in with a bit about plastic... most plastics that we use in our everyday life can't easily be converted back into their original chemical constituants. There are ways to do it but they require a lot of energy and only work well for certain types of plastic.

The problem is that on and industrial scale it's difficult to tell different types of plastic appart and they can't easily be mixed together. Compare for example recyclying metal, for the most part the scrap feed stock is only iron and aluminium which can be separated with a magnet - there's no plastic magnet. The problem is exasebated by the fact that a lot of items contain two different types of plastic which have to be mechanically separated (look at plastic bottles, the top is often a different plastic to the body). The colouring agents used in the plastic also can't easily be removed so coloured plastic is a lot less likely to be recycled.

Because of these problems a lot of the plastic that is recycled now is just ground up and used as a filler in new plastic. This reduces the amount of new material used but the end result isn't as good as we get from metal and glass recycling where the recycled items is as good as the original. Biodegradable plastics are a possible solution to some problems but not all and they would still need to be collected for disposal.