We’ll kick off this week with a fairly common question about our Acrylic Blanks – what finish should be used over them? The answer is none!
The first thing to consider that is without special preparation it’s difficult to get a coating to stick to plastic, so any coating that’s applied is likely to peel away in time. Then, even if we could get it to adhere satisfactorily, there’s nothing that can be applied that is tougher than the plastic itself, so the coating wouldn’t offer any extra protection or serve any real purpose.
Our suggestion for ‘finishing’ these is to prepare the surface as well as possible then use Burnishing Cream for a final cut back to bring up a beautiful, deep shine.

In a similar vein, we were asked how long Melamine Lacquer should be left before polishing it with Burnishing Cream. As anyone who’s seen one of my demos will know,  I use Burnishing Cream on top of Melamine Lacquer after about 5 minutes (it depends how much I’m jabbering on about it!) and this is quite acceptable. We’ve been told though that if you can leave it 24 hours the result is even more impressive.
Burnishing Cream can be used on Cellulose Sanding Sealer, any of our lacquers, Friction Polish and even on Hard Wax Oil and Finishing Oil, as long as they are allowed to dry hard – in the case of the oils 72 hours is best.

This next one flummoxed us a bit…someone asked if they could use white vinegar to thin Tung Oil instead of using white spirit (which is the correct solvent) as they didn’t want the smell of the white spirit on their item.
Frankly we have no idea if this would work but we’re doubtful. What intrigues us is where the idea came from, is this a common practice we’ve never heard of?

The last two questions came from the same source and initially had us scrabbling for Wikipedia…our correspondent had just made a kubb set out of ash. We didn’t know what one was either, click here if you’re in the dark too. The first question was about staining the pieces and how far the stain would penetrate; could a pattern be carved in the surface and expose the unstained timber below?
The answer here is yes, the stain will only soak in a millimetre or two (it will go deeper if you soak if for a few weeks) so this should work perfectly.

The second question was about what finish to use on the pieces; as these will be used outdoors and could get wet we’d normally suggest Acrylic Gloss Lacquer, but because the nature of the game means they’ll be bashed about a bit the lacquer could be too brittle, so we suggested using Hard Wax Oil, a maximum of two coats, which should be flexible enough to give if it needs to whilst hard-wearing and water resistant enough to stand the intended use.

Hope you picked up something there, even if it was just what the game of kubb is!

See you in seven days

Terry