Making Rosin and Fly Tying Wax

Two weeks ago I scraped some pine resin off of a pine tree. This week I turned it into rosin, then blended it into fly tying wax.

What is rosin?

Rosin is the stuff musicians rub on violin bows to help them grip the strings better and produce better vibrations. Baseball pitchers use it to grip the baseball better, too. It is also in the core of some solders as flux. When added to wax, it provides tackiness.

Rosin is a brittle substance made from pine resin, essentially heated until the natural turpentines boil off. Rosin made this way is darker. The lighter clear stuff you see for sale in music shops is made by chemically separating and distilling out the turpentines and pine oils.

Collecting pine resin

I took a walk in the woods at the end of my street and found the pine resin I needed on the third pine tree I found.

Filtering

Some guides I found tell you to just burn the pine resin and it will turn into rosin. The problem is that most resin contains lots of bark, leaf pieces, bugs, etc. This stuff all turns into carbon when burned, so you have carbon + resin, which is essentially pitch. Useful stuff too, but I wanted just rosin, so I decided to separate it out. The best way I found to filter it is to dissolve the resin with acetone, then strain it through a coffee filter.

Refining

Once you have filtered acetone+resin, it is time to boil the acetone off. Acetone has a low boiling point (~132F), so I used a crock pot with oil in a double boiler setup and the acetone mixture in a small metal cup lined with aluminum foil. It took about an hour to boil off.

I recommend not using an open flame, as acetone is pretty flammable. This small crock pot lives in my workshop for tasks like this.

Next the natural turpentines need to be boiled off. They have a much higher boiling point, around ~350F, so I used a propane burner in a double boiler setup for that. With the acetone gone, I was much less concerned about it catching fire.

This took another hour, and after it cooled I got ~10g of brittle, crumbly rosin. Exactly what I wanted.

Fly tying wax blends

I wanted to make three different blends of wax for fly tying:

Dubbing wax – A medium-soft sticky blend to apply directly to thread in advance of adding dubbing

Rosin: 70%

Beeswax :10%

Oil: 20%

Hard wax – A hard sticky wax that needs to be slightly warmed and softened before use, used for adhesion/sticking things in place to keep them from moving when you are tying them on. You can also wax your thread with this to keep it from unwinding if you don’t have a bobbin to keep tension. Sometimes called Cobbler’s wax or tying wax.

Rosin: 50%

Beeswax: 40%

Oil: 10%

Soft wax – A soft sticky wax made for a quick swipe of the finger to make your fingers a bit tackier for dubbing material. Not made for applying to the thread directly, just your thumb and index finger.

Rosin: 20%

Beeswax: 30%

Oil 50%

I used these two resources for ratio inspiration:

https://www.flyanglersonline.com/flytying/tyingtips/part139.php

https://www.flytying.ro/understanding-the-tying-wax-for-beginners-and-not-only/

For the oil I used castor oil. I was going to use something like generic vegetable oil or grapeseed oil, but when I looked it up I learned that castor is thicker, tackier, and more viscous than cooking oils. I found some at the drug store, where it is sold as a laxative and as a hair product. Who knew?!

I thought about using duck fat for the soft wax, but the only duck fat I had on hand was saved from dinner, tinted red and smelled like paprika and garlic, so that was out.

I did a bit of math to figure out the allocation of rosin to each blend, then calculate the other ingredients based on the amount of rosin in each. I weighed them out with a sensitive scale.

I set up a double boiler again on the propane burner, this time with water instead of oil, and melted down each set of ingredients. It took me 3x as long as I expected to melt this stuff down. The rosin took a long time to soften to the point where I could blend it in with the beeswax and castor oil.

Once liquified and blended, I poured each into the appropriate vessel or mold.

The dubbing wax went into a small twist-up stick I salvaged from some old sunscreen we had for Charlie when he was a baby.

The soft wax went into a small jar, salvaged from some cosmetic samples Amanda was done with.

The hard wax I poured into a silicone ice cube mold.

I let the wax set and cool for 24 hours, then tested it out. They are all appropriately sticky, which was the goal of making the rosin.

Both the dubbing wax and the soft wax allowed me to make a dubbing noodle on regular thread with no problem after applying this wax. Pre-wax it wouldn’t stay.

The first is a green hot butt nymph with a green dubbing body. The second is a Dave Whitlock Red Fox Squirrel Nymph. Tail is fox squirrel guard hair, dubbing is the squirrel’s under fur and a bit of ice dub. I hunted the squirrel myself. Size 12 fly.

I’m pretty happy with the outcome, even though working with the small quantities of rosin was a pain. Even this small amount is likely to last me a couple years, so not much need to make a larger batch unless someone else I know gets into tying and wants some.

I might melt and transfer the dubbing wax from the twist-up stick to an old Burt’s Bees chapstick container for the smaller size. We’ll see.