Solid wax — beeswax, carnauba, microcrystalline — softened with a solvent into a paste, rubbed onto wood / metal / stone, the solvent flashes off, the wax stays. Soft sheen, hand-feel of the substrate intact, refreshable forever. The traditional museum-collection finish.
Wax dissolved in mineral spirits / turpentine / Stoddard solvent at ~30–50% solids. Applied with a cloth, allowed to flash 5–15 min, buffed off with a soft cloth. Carnauba is the hardest natural wax (mp 82–86 °C), gives the brightest sheen but is brittle; beeswax (mp 62–64 °C) is softer, gentler hand. Microcrystalline waxes (Renaissance Wax — Cosmolloid 80H) are the museum standard for permanence, neutrality, and reversibility. Film thickness ~1–5 µm; sheds water but not solvents. No film hardness — buff a fingerprint out, rebuff to restore.
character — soft satin, warm, low-gloss, retains the substrate's hand, smells faintly of solvent then nothing.
SSPC / NACE surface-coating standards; manufacturer technical literature for the specific coating chemistry.
House vocabulary — terms ForMatter uses with intent.
Materials and processes for people who design and make things.
A local-first library of materials, processes, applications, and finishes — equal weight, citable everywhere, so a student can move from "what is this" toward "what's actually buildable here, now, by me." Part of the renato.design ecosystem — sibling of Plenum, Specimen, Ingenue, gesture, graf, and the Renato Rhino plug-ins. Form and matter, inseparable.
Half of teaching materials is teaching how the material is made into the thing. The standard subscription library was always light on that half. The wedge here isn't better samples or a prettier interface — it's treating Process as a peer entity, not a footnote.
Conway, Lefteri, Forty, Sparke, ASM, GIA. Every voice: Voices.
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