As always, lots of questions came in this week all needing answers, and as always they all got them.
One was from someone stripping back an old chest of drawers that had been in the family for a long time. The finish on the top was badly damaged and he was certain that it had been french polished and wanted to know the best way to remove all of the old, cracked polish. Meths and a scraper are probably one of the best ways to start this. The meths will dissolve the old shellac coating and make it soft enough to scrape off; this will remove most of it but care needs to be taken, the resultant sludge can be very messy.

Another caller this morning uses our Acrylic Sanding Sealer and Acrylic Lacquer and loves them. The only problem was that in his haste today he’d picked up the wrong bottle and applied the lacquer onto the bare wood rather than the sealer and he was quite distraught about it.
It’s not really a huge problem. The sealer does an important job, gives a better end result and generally makes life easier for the user, but leaving it out of the process won’t ruin the job. It will need a little extra work to sand back and could require an extra coat to get the same build, but that’s about all. The toughness, protection and gloss come from the lacquer so that won’t change.

The last question for this week concerns that old favourite ‘Toy Safety’. We were asked if our Liquid Wax conforms to the regulations governing this. It probably does, but we’ve never had it tested, because we don’t really think that it’s a suitable finish for a toy – it’s not really hard wearing enough. We don’t want to put ‘toy safe’ on something because it also infers ‘toy suitable’ and that’s not always the case. It’s the same for Friction Polish and a couple of other things too.

The weekend looms, I hope you have a good one and as if by magic I’ll be here next week and also in Somerset. Hopefully I’ll see you in at least one or the other.

Cheers

Terry