Penny a Stick: A Brief History of Burn-in Sticks
There is a small tool tradition hiding inside every furniture shop that never quite made it into the histories: the repair stick. Not the finish itself — the fix. The chip on a table edge, the gouge in a door stile, the dent that arrived in the moving van. For at least a hundred and thirty years, the answer has been the same: a stick of hard, colored resin, a hot knife, and a steady hand.
The Victorians called it beaumontage
The earliest full description we've found in print is from Paul Hasluck's Wood Finishing, published in the 1890s. He called the material "hard stopping or beaumontage," and his description will sound familiar to anyone who has ever held a burn-in stick:
"Hard stopping can be made up in an infinite variety of colours like sticks of sealing-wax, and it can, with care, be selected to match any wood. It will not shrink, but retains a level surface and takes the polish well."
The tool was whatever would hold heat — Hasluck suggests "a worn-out 6-in. flat file in a handle," pressed against the stick "somewhat similarly to the way in which the tinker uses his copper bit and solder." And it was already a commercial product, not a shop-made one: hard stopping "can be bought ready for use at most places where veneers and fancy woods are sold for about one penny per stick."
A penny a stick, in the 1890s, anywhere fine wood was sold. This was never an obscure trick. It was the trade's standard repair.
Fifty colors and a color card, 1925
By the 1920s the American finishing trade had industrialized the idea. F. N. Vanderwalker's Wood Finishing, Plain and Decorative — a standard shop manual, Chicago, 1925 — describes the material almost exactly as we would today:
"This cement is made of shellac and rosin colored to match the standard finishes… Shellac sticks are made in more than fifty colors and you can get color cards from the manufacturers showing just what is available. The cheaper grades do not work right."
Shellac and rosin. More than fifty colors. Color cards from the manufacturer. And a warning about cheap sticks that we would co-sign word for word, a century later. That 1925 page is, recipe for recipe, the tradition our sticks still belong to.
Somewhere along the way the trade's name for the technique changed. The old "shellac stick patching" — palette knife heated over an alcohol lamp — picked up an electric knife and a new name: burning-in. The sticks became burn-in sticks. The big finishing houses of the twentieth century — Behlen, whose history reaches back to the 1880s; Mohawk, founded 1948 — taught the technique to generations of repair techs, and their classes are a big part of why the furniture-repair trade still exists.
The survivor
Most of the old stick makers are gone now, folded into conglomerates or simply stopped. Which brings us to the line on our shelves.
Our recipes begin with M. L. Campbell, a finishing-supply house in Kansas City, in the 1930s. On our shelf sits a Campbell instruction book from 1937 — How to Use Campbell Finish Repair Specialties, "by M. L. Campbell" — and its chapter on repairing with stick shellac reads like the advice we give over the counter today: match the stick to the surface as nearly as you can, remember that heat darkens the cement, and when you cannot match exactly, choose the color slightly lighter, never darker. The recipe cards we pour from still carry that era's chemistry at their core: button lac and rosin, colored one pot at a time.
From Campbell the formulas passed through several hands and became the house line of Merit Industries, a furniture-restoration supply house also of Kansas City, selling "Merit Burn-In Sticks" from a warehouse at 1020 North 10th Street on the early web by 1997. In 2014 the line moved west, into the hands of Ron Ashby of Wood Finish Supply and Shellac.net in Napa, California — a man who spent, in his own words, forty-two years "instructing finish workshops and supplying finishers with materials for finishing, restoration and refinishing." And in 2026, when Ron retired, the Merit sticks — the recipes, the numbered color line, the remaining factory stock — came to us in Afton, Virginia.
Nine decades, four names, one unbroken line of shellac-and-rosin sticks. The color numbers stamped into each stick — No. 5 Light Golden Oak, No. 20 Medium Walnut, No. 101 Amber — ride through the whole chain unchanged, the direct descendants of the numbered color cards Vanderwalker described in 1925. We still pour them by hand, one color at a time, each stick embossed with its number — the same numbers a repair tech would have ordered against decades ago.
Eighty-six colors, one page
When the line came to Virginia we did something the penny-a-stick era never could: we photographed every color, stick by stick, under one light, and put the whole line on a single page — sortable by hue and tone, searchable, comparable edge to edge. Vanderwalker's readers sent away for a color card. Yours is here:
Next time you melt a stick into a chipped edge and level it flat, you're not doing anything new. You're doing something at least a hundred and thirty years old, that has outlived every fashion in finishing — because it works.