Had a couple brushes that I wasn't terribly happy with the knot so thought I'd play around with replacing them. The originals were:
-Vie Long 14080: Acrylic resin handle & horsehair knot (too skritchy for my tastes)
-Vie Long 4312: Beech handle & horsehair knot (the knot was getting VERY floppy after a couple dozen uses and holding on to too much lather)
-Omega 10282: ABS handle & boar knot (nothing wrong with it, just decided it could be sacrificed for the cause)
I looked on B&B and youtube for methods of getting the existing knots out and the one that appeared the easiest was to boil the brush. In the few videos I watched it appeared as though the knot would almost fall out after being boiled for ~15 minutes. Bravo sierra! I boiled all three brushes for up to 30 minutes each and if anything I think the fibers swelled making the knots tighter.
The Vie Long with the resin handle tolerated the boiling water without issues. The varnish on the birch handle softened and will need to be complete refinish if I decide to replace the knot. And the Omega ended up with some funky problems on the finish of the handle and it will be trashed.
I tried to put the brushes in a vise and pulling the knot out with pliers, no luck. Ended up cutting off as much of the knot as possible then drilling out the rest which ended up working but there were a couple of issues. Namely, I wasn't expecting there to be a metal ring around the knots and with the beech handle a 1/2" metal spike sticking up into the knot. I had started with the beech handle and the bit got caught up in the band causing a drill to snap in my handle. Then when removing the rest of the knot the bit bounced off the spike, chowdering up the edge of the well and ended up chipping the chrome off the exterior. You can't really see see the edges if there's a knot installed but it still looks a bit manky.
For the time being I purchased a fairly inexpensive synthetic knot as a replacement and just used some silicone to secure it in place. Of the three handles its the red/milk resin one I like to most so pleased that its survived. Will likely pick up a proper badger knot and secure it permanently with an epoxy.
-Vie Long 14080: Acrylic resin handle & horsehair knot (too skritchy for my tastes)
-Vie Long 4312: Beech handle & horsehair knot (the knot was getting VERY floppy after a couple dozen uses and holding on to too much lather)
-Omega 10282: ABS handle & boar knot (nothing wrong with it, just decided it could be sacrificed for the cause)
I looked on B&B and youtube for methods of getting the existing knots out and the one that appeared the easiest was to boil the brush. In the few videos I watched it appeared as though the knot would almost fall out after being boiled for ~15 minutes. Bravo sierra! I boiled all three brushes for up to 30 minutes each and if anything I think the fibers swelled making the knots tighter.
The Vie Long with the resin handle tolerated the boiling water without issues. The varnish on the birch handle softened and will need to be complete refinish if I decide to replace the knot. And the Omega ended up with some funky problems on the finish of the handle and it will be trashed.
I tried to put the brushes in a vise and pulling the knot out with pliers, no luck. Ended up cutting off as much of the knot as possible then drilling out the rest which ended up working but there were a couple of issues. Namely, I wasn't expecting there to be a metal ring around the knots and with the beech handle a 1/2" metal spike sticking up into the knot. I had started with the beech handle and the bit got caught up in the band causing a drill to snap in my handle. Then when removing the rest of the knot the bit bounced off the spike, chowdering up the edge of the well and ended up chipping the chrome off the exterior. You can't really see see the edges if there's a knot installed but it still looks a bit manky.
For the time being I purchased a fairly inexpensive synthetic knot as a replacement and just used some silicone to secure it in place. Of the three handles its the red/milk resin one I like to most so pleased that its survived. Will likely pick up a proper badger knot and secure it permanently with an epoxy.