Baby Wipes... Big Mistake?

Hello!

Hoping to get some advice... This morning I wiped a few of my chess pieces with a baby wipe. It appears to have removed the finish. It's quite blotchy now. Is there anything I can do to restore them?

Brief googling says this may be a "shellac" finish and I should simply re-shellac them. I'm not a woodworking professional. Any advice?

It's a brand new set, so I'm a bit disappointed :/

Gentle enough for a baby's bottom... but not your new chess set!

Ingredients:

I’m not an expert but a lot of respected people in the forums have talked about this Wax.

https://www.chess.com/forum/view/chess-equipment/renaissance-micro-crystalline-wax

Sorry to hear about your troubles. I think shellac is pretty thick and very difficult to remove. It will take more than baby wipes to remove it. The finish was probably done with something else. I think there a a few members who are pretty knowledgeable in this area. @GregHunt comes to mind. You can try to contact Mandeep to see what he used on the Dubrovnik set. I hope you get it resolved. 

I've put Ren Wax on almost all of my wooden sets, whether they needed it or not .  It has made a 30 year old Rosewood set look much sharper, and for a sheesham set that seemed rather blah it darkened and sharpened the brown pieces enough to give them a little "uumph."

I also had a white boxwood piece that had what may have been a natural color disfigurement that I made worse by being too aggressive with soap and water.  When I treated this set with Ren Waz, I was at least able to give the piece a uninform feel by sealing it with the wax.

My only issue is that on at least some of my sets it seems as if the pieces now feel "tacky."  I'm not sure if this is due to my having to buff the pieces by hand rather than by machine.

Clear shoe polish ,  then buff  / Tip from AD

I don't see any harsh chemicals in that that could strip finish, could it just be a residue from the wipes left on the pieces? Have you tried cleaning with just a wet towel or something?

It had never occurred to me before today to look up a Material Safety Data Sheet for baby wipes, an unexpectedly funny document:  "Inhalation (acute): Not an expected route of exposure."  Clearly the author has never encountered a baby.  

The finish could just be, is likely to be, wax, in which case the chemicals in a baby wipe would be expected to remove some amount of it, and the more vigorous the rubbing the more that would come off.   Shellac should not come off THAT easily and should flake if it did since it appears that baby wipes do not contain alcohol that would dissolve it.  More modern finishes should be even more resitant to the baby wipes.  Ask the maker what the finish is.  If it is wax, just apply a layer of wax to the pieces, the patchiness isn't really visible in the picture and may just be differences in how shiny the piece is, and I'd expect that a simple cabinet maker's wax would work well and adhere to whatever was there already.  Apply it very sparingly and very thinly, and buff it off well, you may have to do it a couple of times.  Renaissance wax contains polythene as I recall and I'd expect it to feel a bit odd if you let it build up or applied a thick layer.   

A lot of Balinese carvings are finished with boot polish, not clear though…

It turns out that a wet cloth does the very same thing! So it's not something in the Baby Wipes, rather something about contact with water which removes the finish or polish from the pieces...

Hmm...

It's also not flaky - so likely not shellac? Instead the polish simply disappears and the natural wood becomes exposed.

Did you contact whoever sold it to you? 

I had exactly the same problem a year ago with my pieces from HOS. I was holding them to remove the felt so I could attach my Certabo chips and the finish came off on my fingers. Just the moisture from my fingers removed it, it didn't need extra water or wipes! I contacted HOS and got absolutely no help at all.

So I ended up removing what was left and applying an oil based wipe-on polyu varnish. Details here:

https://goneill.co.nz/chess-pieces.php

If a danp cloth removes more, then its probably a soft wax finish. Shellac sticks well and is hard when dry, so without a solvent it has to come off in pieces. 

@Graham_NZ - very interesting thank you for the input.

How did you remove the polish entirely? I tried to remove all polish on a few pieces using a damp rag (as a test), but it's difficult to remove everything.

Your link implies you held the wood pieces under a running tap? Is this correct? Would such an act damage the pieces?

Your post is very interesting and gives me hope!

I know zero about woodworking but . . . it sounds like a conservative approach would be to try @greghunt's advice first, using just a small area of the piece. That sounds easier to "undo" than first trying an oil-based varnish. I hope the vendor can be helpful, at least with regard to the original finish that was applied.

Yes, there comes a point where a damp rag doesn't remove it. I don't think making it wetter helped either so avoid using any more water - it might lift the fibres in the wood or if too much soaked in might make the pieces crack. A very fine sand paper (400 or so) was best.

But @greghunt is correct about going slowly and checking with the vendor first. Once you start with an oil varnish there is no going back as it soaks into the wood and colours it. I would have used the water based wipe-on but I couldn't find it here in NZ and didn't want to start mixing my own.

If its wax you don’t need to get it all off, so long as the two waxes are clear and will bond (and this appears to be a low-tech wax) then you can put more on to fix the missing bits.