Hello Chestnuteers!

If you’re reading this whilst it’s still fresh in your inbox I’ll be getting ready for the first day at the Woodworking Show at Westpoint in Exeter. Are you coming along?
If you’re not quite that far south I’ll also be at the Toolpost Open Day next weekend too.

I’ll start this week with a very cheeky question. Users of our Buffing Wheels have asked several times if we could produce a version with all three wheels on one spindle. I honestly couldn’t see the advantage of this idea, but we made a prototype and I tried it out and I was converted. I loaded up all three wheels before starting buffing and was able to move straight from one wheel to another very quickly. I’ve never thought that changing the big wheels was a nuisance, I still don’t, but for buffing small items this really is a boon. We’re calling it the Buffing Tree and you can see more about it on our website.

An emailer asked about painting over our Spirit Stains; they’d decorated something with our stains and wanted to give some extra highlighting to certain areas. As long as there’s nothing else on the stains (no waxes, polishes etc) then this should be fine; stained wood can usually be treated as bare wood – just coloured!

And finally for this week, food safety rears its head again – when making something that will be in contact with food, does the whole surface need to be food safe? We’d say not, only the parts expected to be used with food, but it wouldn’t hurt to use it as much as possible on food items. Don’t forget the Microcrystalline Wax has been passed as food safe if you need something a little more durable.

And there I will stop for this week as I need to finish loading the van and get down to Exeter.
Hope you have a good week if I don’t see you in the meantime

All the best

Terry