While in Tel Aviv last week, I paid a visit to a few of my favorite places – trade stores and friends’ shops that I used to frequent while living in Israel. One of these places was Sahar Finishes store. The owner, Mosha Srebrnik, is the grandson of the man who founded the business almost a hundred years ago. The small corner store looks as if it has hardly changed since then, except for replacing some of the old metal containers that used to house the pigments and other chemicals with plastic jars and barrels.
In addition to the generic inventory of modern finishes and glues the store also carries powder pigments for stain and die making, raw linseed oil, two kinds of hide glue, and two kinds of shellac flakes. The shellac is imported directly from India while the hide glue is imported from either Eastern Europe or the Far East. Moshe told me that European Union regulations make it more difficult for manufacturers to produce it in the EU, therefore, hide glue manufacturing has moved eastward. Read more about hide glue in Chris Schwarz’s blog and Bob Flexner’s blog .
One of the store’s frequent customers is my friend Shay Avrahami, who is a very talented furniture restorer and whose shop is just a few blocks away from the Sahar store. In my next post, I will show his furniture restoration shop and the unique tools that he found, built or restored over the years.
—Yoav Liberman
Here are some supplies and tools we find essential in our everyday work around the shop. We may receive a commission from sales referred by our links; however, we have carefully selected these products for their usefulness and quality.