Hi

Have you had a good week? I hope you’ve managed to find some time to get out and do some woodwork, whichever of the many disciplines you prefer. We know that whilst many of our readers are woodturners, we also have our fair share of carvers, cabinetmakers, marquetarians, pyrographers… I wish I hadn’t started that now as I know I’ll have missed someone! If that’s you, I’m really sorry.
Maybe I’d better get on with the questions!

I’m always happy when Chestnuteers respond to items in the Newsletter, and I had some interesting correspondence this week. I’m going to include some of them…
I mentioned Richard Findley’s demo last week, and his use of pewter. A question came up about whether it was possible to put the hot pewter in the fridge to force it to cool down quicker. Anthony M offered this opinion:
‘I believe that if this was tried the mass of the metal would be cooled in different layers and I think would change the crystalline strata and might cause uneven density. The heat would also cause the build up of bacteria in nearby food.’
That seems to make sense to me, but as Richard almost said (you’ll get the joke if you saw the demo), ‘I’m no metallurgist’, so I can’t say with any certainty.

Also last week I said about using Surgical Spirit as a cleaner before applying a coating, and David J wrote in saying that he much prefers Isoproply Alcohol as it is a much cleaner solvent. It’s a fair point. Surgical Spirit is always my ‘go-to’ as it’s much more user friendly, but Isopropyl Alcohol will do an excellent job of cleaning surfaces. The only problem with it is, it’s used a lot in hand sanitizers and has been in short supply lately, which pushed the price up dramatically! It has started to settle down a bit now though.

Cast your mind back a few months to when I was talking about the effect of the cold weather on finishing. I mentioned that our friend Mick G uses a greenhouse heater in his workshop, and I was asked for more details, which I now have…
Mick doesn’t recommend any particular type, and reckons they can be picked up for around £15 or so. As they have a thermostat they are very economical, and Mick recently calculated that they cost very little to run – ‘pence per day’ was his comment. He does make the point that his workshop is very well insulated, and this is important of course. Sometimes, he says, the workshop will still be warm from the day before. The insulation also keeps most of the noise from his machinery inside – keeping him on his neighbour’s good side!
Mick also makes the important point about where to place the heater, it must have plenty of space around it so that it doesn’t inadvertantly cause a fire.

And that’s everything for this week. We hit a record number of readers last week, thank you for your support!
Also last week, I said I’d include a link to our quiz on 13 March. I hope you’ll be able to join in the fun. Click here to go to the quiz on YouTube – you can set a reminder now if you’d like!
If you prefer to ask the questions, we’re hoping to run another Question Time session soon, where you get the chance to put your turning questions to a panel of expert professionals. If you’ve got a question for them just hit reply and send it in.

I’ll look forward to seeing you here again next week

Cheers

Terry