Hi

Well I for one am glad that it’s nearly the weekend! It’s been another hectic week here, but with some real highlights as well. Which includes an amazing demo by Richard Findley (standing in at the last minute for Les Thorne, who will return for us another time). If you didn’t see the demo you can still catch it for about ten days here on our YouTube channel.
I hope you’ve had a good week, especially with the news of, hopefully, better times ahead.
Let’s see if we can answer some questions.

If you saw Richard’s demo, you’ll have seen him polish his pewter casting with Burnishing Cream to bring up a very bright shine. He mentioned that the Burnishing Cream also works on many of our polishes and lacquers – if you’re not sure which ones have a quick check on our Compatibility Chart.
A question that came in this week asked how long to leave the finishes before using the Burnishing Cream? The general rule for this is to allow the coating to dry completely; it needs to be ‘hard dry’ so that the abrasive in the Burnishing Cream doesn’t remove it accidentally. So for oils it’d be 2-3 days, for Friction Polish I leave it until the surface has cooled after application (usually just a couple of minutes) etc. Melamine Lacquer is a bit of an odd one. It can be burnished after about 20 minutes as the lacquer has air dried by then. But if you can leave it another 24 hours it will have started its curing process and will be just that bit harder yet, and will polish up even better. So in that case, it depends how patient you can be!

Another question came in that is relevant to Richard’s demo (really getting my money’s worth here!). As I mentioned, Richard was working with pewter and a question came in, by coincidence, asking about lacquering over pewter. My correspondent was using Acrylic Gloss Lacquer but was finding that it was delaminating in certain areas. This isn’t really expected and I don’t know why this should be happening. In his demo Richard finished his pewter with this lacquer and we know it will help dramatically slow down the tarnishing process. There were also no reported adhesion problems. The only things I can think of here are that there are differing grades of pewter, perhaps there is some type of ‘contaminant’ there causing a problem. The only solution I could think of was to make sure the surface of the pewter is as clean as possible, a wipe over with Surgical Spirit is always good for this.

And I’m going to stay with the demo for the last question, something that came up in the chat. It was to do with storing Cyanoacrylate Superglues and whether it is necessary to keep them in a fridge? Or even to freeze them? I know we’ve been here before, but as it came up I thought I’d mention it again. The experts I’ve spoken to tell me that cool, dry and dark is best for Superglues, away from heat sources and direct sunlight. So a fridge meets all of these requirements, although a shaded cupboard would probably be as good for most of the year! Freezing the glues, incidentally, could have an adverse effect.

And once again we’ve come to the end of another Newsletter. I mentioned there will be, we hope, better times ahead, but as we’re still pretty much stuck indoors for a while longer we’ll be holding another of our fun quizzes on 13 March, live on YouTube as always. Free to enter, easy to take part, and there’s a £50 prize going to the winner’s chosen charity. It’s a fun way to waste a couple of hours on a Saturday, I’ll be giving you the links next week.

Until then, enjoy the weekend, and I’ll see you back here in seven.

Cheers

Terry