Greetings!

I’m back at base now after all my travels here, there and everywhere. I had an enjoyable couple of days at Woodworks@Daventry, I know some of you were there and thanks for the positive comments. I also now know at least one of you reads this in bed on a Friday morning, it’s probably time you got up!!

A mixed bag of questions this week, including a very odd one that we struggled with. A caller from Germany rang; her company had made some PCBs (printed circuit boards) which once made are coated in a lacquer to protect them. The problem was that there had been an error in the manufacturing causing them to fail at -30 degrees C. They had experimented with our Cellulose Thinners and managed to remove the lacquer so that they could fix the error, but before doing all 100 of the boards she wanted to know if we thought the thinners would attack them.
We were stumped. That’s so far away from our knowledge and experience of the product that we just couldn’t give a definitive answer. Which to be fair was what the caller expected so I didn’t feel that we’d let her down.
A couple of things that she was able to take away from the conversation though was that if you want a finish that is  resistant to most solvents you’re usually looking at a two-pack system. And where the solvent softened the lacquer they were using, once it has evaporated the lacquer should harden again as if new.

Another question was about our Finishing Oil and using it outdoors. This is a fairly common question and the Finishing Oil has always been great for this purpose, and recently we boosted the UV filters in it to make it even better. At the same time we switched the solvent to a de-aromatised version, meaning that it doesn’t smell quite as much. The performance and application are exactly the same, we don’t really expect anyone to notice a difference.
The formulation has been re-tested for EN71-3 (toy safety) and it still conforms to this.

Another odd question to finish with, I’m not sure if I’ve had it before,  a caller was renovating some limed oak doors and wanted to freshen up the Liming Wax on them and wanted to remove the existing wax first. How to do this?
It’s probably not going to be easy and will almost certainly be messy, our best suggestion was a scrubbing brush (to get in the grain) in conjunction with White Spirit (to soften the wax). The only bit of good news we were able to offer on this was that even if some of the original wax is left behind it shouldn’t matter too much, Liming Wax (all waxes really) are pretty low-tech and very forgiving.

That’s all for this week folks, you’ll have had our GDPR email by now, if you haven’t clicked and replied already please do, we’ve tried to keep it short and sweet. If you prefer you can simply reply to this email giving your consent to continue sending our emails to you.

I’m going to enjoy a weekend at home, I hope yours is as good and I’ll see you in a week’s time.

Cheers

Terry