Hello Chestnuteers!

There was a technical blip with last week’s Newsletter and for some reason it went out a couple of hours late. Thank you to those who emailed to let me know, it was nice to be missed!
Hopefully back to normal this week, but as we don’t know what caused last week’s delay who can say??
And a quick thank you to Erewash Woodturning Club for their hospitality this week and welcome to any new readers who signed up in the evening.

I had an unusual question this week, about removing pencil marks from timber – the result of some rather too keen marking out. In my defence it’s not really a finishing question so I was rather stumped. My first thought was an eraser but these can make the graphite smear, which wouldn’t help. I resorted to looking on line and the main opinion seems to be that acetone will do the job, although this is getting harder to get hold of these days. It’s commonly used as nail varnish remover, but many of these are now acetone free so I don’t know how they’d work on pencil lines. It’s ironic that we’ve worked hard to take out as many ‘nasty’ solvents as we can from our products without sacrificing their performance, if we’d left some of them in they would also still remove pencil lines. Do you have any tips on this one that I could share next week?

An emailer asked if Lemon Oil is food safe, to which we replied that the only products that have been tested and approved for use with food contact items are the Food Safe Finish (obviously) and the Microcrystalline Wax. Our correspondent then asked if using the Microcrystalline Wax over the Lemon Oil (which is an acceptable combination) would make the surface food safe, and the answer is that we don’t know. The Microcrystalline Wax was tested on its own, so we can’t say how using it with the Lemon Oil (or any other product) would work out. The best way to view this is that we can guarantee the wax will maintain the safety of the surface it has been applied to. We can’t say if it will upgrade a previously applied coating.

And finally this week a question about our Buffing Wheels, in particular the C Wheel. Primarily we suggest that this is used with the Carnauba Wax Stick, but it can also be used with the Microcrystalline Wax and the Microcrystalline Wax Stick, they buff perfectly on the C Wheel (but remember to use them sparingly). Can you use the same C Wheel for all three wax variants? Yes you can, waxes are sufficiently low-tech to be able to cope with this. If you’re a bit heavy-handed with the waxes and have a large build-up on the wheel it might be best to remove some of the excess first (coarse abrasive will do this) but that’s about the only consideration.

Don’t forget to check out the links in the block at the bottom of this page for our Facebook, YouTube and Instagram accounts, and if you are a Facebook user you’d be very welcome in our friendly group called Conkers, which features lots of information and stunning pictures of work created and finished in Chestnut Products.

Have yourself a good week and I’ll see you again in seven!

Cheers

Terry