A slightly different start to the Q&A today…

This week I want to deal with a couple of things that I see on the internet and hear people say. People have asked me about them from time to time, are they true? And the answer is NO! Let’s do a bit of mythbusting…

The first one is that all finishes are food safe once they are dry. It’s beyond me how anyone can think this is the case. I’ve written at length in the past that there’s no proper test for food safety for coatings for timber. How I wish there was. But logic would suggest that if all products are food safe, they would also be toy safe – if you can store, prepare and eat food from them, stuff you actually ingest, then it shouldn’t matter if a child licks or chews them. (Remembering, of course, that nothing for children should be small enough for them to put in their mouth and potentially swallow or, probably worse, choke on). So what’s the point of having a test (the EN71 Part 3 regulations) that covers this? Answer; because not all coatings are toy safe, so they simply can’t be food safe!
Also, have you ever walked into a house and smelled fresh paint? Whilst not always unpleasant, there’s a definite odour. Coatings planned for food contact should have an organoleptic test – basically, to make sure that they don’t taint food, by either changing their smell or the taste.

(Our Food Safe Finish is a pharmaceutical grade oil with no taste or smell).

So, it’s always best to check the claims being made, and exactly how they are backed up.

The second myth is about used abrasive. The saying goes that a worn grit then cuts like the next finer one – ‘old 240 grit cuts like 320 grit’. Nope! Old 240 grit cuts like blunt 240 grit!