Hello everyone

And an especially warm welcome to our new subscribers from the East Herts Woodturners where I attended a demo on Wednesday and had a whale of a time – hopefully the audience did too! I’ve been to the club a number of times so rather than do my standard demo I did an almost completely impromptu one, taking time to concentrate on some different things and it worked very well. I must be daring more often!

So what can I tell you this week?
We were asked about matting down Acrylic Lacquer; more to the point, if there is anything that can be added to dull the gloss down before it is applied. We use a ‘matting agent’ to do this, but this needs to be added at the manufacturing stage so the only way to vary the finish is to use an abrasive on it once dry.
(If you need a lot of satin/matt lacquer we can make it to order, but a minimum quantity would be 5 litres).

At the demo this week I was showing off our Buffing Tree, a new product that we’ve delayed the launch of whilst we haggle on the price from the suppliers of the wheels. If you haven’t seen it the Buffing Tree has all three buffing wheels, in a six inch size, on a spindle so that it’s easy to move from one wheel to another, making it ideal when polishing small items – which is what it is intended for. I was asked if this means we don’t recommend the full kit for buffing small items as well, and quite the reverse; the full size (8 inch wheel) kit is great for large and small items (just make sure you hold on to the smaller ones!) so if you only want to buy one kit and don’t mind changing the wheels over then the full size kit is the one to go for.

And sort of talking of buffing (I really must stop starting sentences with ‘and’, I know it’s bad grammar) I was also asked recently about using a fine abrasive to burnish a hard lacquer such as the Melamine Lacquer. This is perfectly okay to do, and wet’n’dry is ideal for this and working through the grades to a very fine level will polish the lacquer up beautifully. Use it wet to lubricate the paper and prevent any scratches.

This Saturday sees me at the Charnwood Open Day in Leicester, some goods deals, demonstrations and a barbecue as well, and all free. It’s always a good day so if you’re in the area and at a loose end pop over and say hello.

If you don’t make it – or even if you do – I’ll be back here next week. See you then!

Terry