Tuesday

It was very stressful, but I managed to cut the pane of glass out of the first sheet we bought! Hand-scoring the glass with a steel wheel is not the most reliable method and we didn't have enough spare glass (or time) for me to become expert at it. I made a lot of practice scores and we used some of them to break the glass, but even a score that looked good to me wasn't a guarantee of a clean break where we wanted it. The wheel would just skip - stop turning maybe??? - in mid-line when as far as I was aware the pressure and speed I was using were consistent, and it chose to do this in the middle of the last cut I had to make to cut the glass to size, and the break DID curve slightly there, even after I took the risk of scoring over that part again. But it only took off one or two millimeters, so the pane still fit into the frame, and we stuck some toothpicks and matchsticks around the edges to shim it in place in the bed of putty.

That brings us to the putty. Linseed oil putty is made of two ingredients, linseed oil (pure, raw, cold pressed) and chalk. It can separate when standing, and ours was purchased like three years ago so it had done that. We read several sets of instructions in our Perinnemestari books by Hannu Rintanen which purport to cover the entire process of window restoration with photo tutorials, and then we read the entire set of instructions on the old house store Domus Classica, and then we read all the instructions endorsed by the Finnish Heritage Agency from Byggnads Apoteket, and the latter was an incredibly detailed 10-page pdf. And none of them said that you should go look up supplementary material elsewhere or anything like that, and they had pictures of how puttying is supposed to go, so we both THOUGHT we knew all we needed to know, so we concluded that our putty had dried out a little and agreed that I should knead a little more linseed oil into it.

This turned out to be a very bad idea. We managed to create a bed of thinned putty and get the pane down in it, but it was impossible to shape the putty on top of the glass with the putty knife or a finger. So I ended up watching a bunch of videos yesterday, and found out that the putty is too soft. Also you're supposed to be able to just knead it to dissolve the little crusty bits of linseed oil that collect on the outside of it, but they are refusing to dissolve after copious kneading. Possibly the percentage increase in crust by having had it sit for a whole three years has made it so it would require three hours of kneading or something like that, idk. But meanwhile, it has sat out to dry overnight and been kneaded on a sheet of cardboard, which is another common tip to dry it out a little, and it still won't be shaped with a finger and a putty knife, so I cannot figure out how to make it into the traditional shape of window putty joining the glass to the wooden frame. We drove all the way to Raisio last night (other side of the Turku urban area, about 45 minutes each way) to the closest available source of pure linseed oil paint and chalk dust, so the next step is trying to knead more chalk dust into it. But I'm not looking forward to this since my last attempt to change the consistency was so disastrous.

Also, small songbirds love traditional linseed oil putty and they are known to eat it in the winter. It's a big problem that you can find by searching in Swedish and Finnish. The #1 tip seems to be kneading pepper into the putty, lol. If the putty is already dry you can try to protect it by rubbing it with garlic. Well. Here goes I guess?

It's now less than 1 week until I have to leave for my flight to the US.