When I was growing up, my grandparents owned a small country hardware store. I worked there as a teen and my 20s. Needless to say, I have a lot of memories from those days, including an old woodworker who would come in to buy tung oil. He spoke of it like it was an elixir of the gods—the perfect finish. Even today, I hear folks speak with reverence about tung oil.

or centuries, shellac was widely considered the best wood finish in the world. Then, modern finish manufacturers convinced us that shellac was old-fashioned. “That’s what your grandfather used! The modern woodworker uses polyurethane!”