Hi

I hope you’ve had a good week. It’s been another busy one for us, getting orders out the door, making more stock to replace them, and generally rushing around all over the place. Tomorrow I’ll be at Sandon Woodturners for a demo in the morning, come and say hello if you’re there.
This week’s featured picture is a lovely yew bowl from James Pearson

It’s very fitting that this bowl came out of the draw at random this week, James calls this his Valentine’s Bowl. I hope you can see why!
And now it’s time for some questions and answers…

Mistakes happen! We had a question in recently about how to remove some Acrylic Sanding Sealer from some Jesmonite, as it had resulted in an uneven colour – the fault of the substrate, not the lacquer.
Although Acrylic Sanding Sealer is water based, once dried it won’t readily redissolve with water, something stronger is needed. Cellulose Thinners is the answer here, this will soften the sealer (or, if needed, an Acrylic Lacquer) and make it easier to remove. It’s probably going to be a messy job though, so lots of newspaper and stuff on the floor to protect it!

An odd question recently concerned our Buffing Wheel Kit, or more accuarately, the Compounds that come with it. Our caller was using the kit as instructed, but was having trouble getting the compound to transfer onto the wheel. Compound 1 is a brown colour, so it’s pretty easy to see when it’s on the wheel – and obvious that it wasn’t! I was at a complete loss to understand what was happening here, there’s not much that can go wrong with this!
The answer was the weather. This was during a very cold spell, and the compounds had got very cold from being in the workshop. I can only guess that they’d got so cold that the friction from the spinning wheel wasn’t enough to melt them (and thus transfer onto the wheel), it was probably only polishing them – not the desired effect. A few days indoors, in the warm, soon brought them back to their proper state, and doing what they should.

Finally this week, we were asked if Cellulose Sanding Sealer could be used before using an acrylic primer and acrylic paint. In this case, the timber was very absorbent and using too much primer.
It’s always hard to be certain when mixing brands, but our best, informed guess was that this would be fine. The Cellulose Sanding Sealer is very versatile and liable to work with pretty much anything you can throw at it. Acrylic paints, being water based, shouldn’t have anything in them that could attack the sealer, and there’s nothing in the sealer that should prevent the primer from adhering to it. As always in cases like this, we suggested a test piece first, but I’m 99% sure it’ll work.

And there you go, it’s the end of another Newsletter. I’m continually grateful for the kind comments I get about it, it’s good to know it’s still popular, thank you.
We’re announcing more and more extra detail about our Woodturning Weekender every week, we send out a separate bulletin about it most Sundays, so make sure you sign up via the website. We already have our first visitors travelling to us by plane, and as restrictions lift we’re expecting even more. Don’t let distance put you off, we’d love to see you there!

But before that, I’ll be back again next week, and I’ll certainly see you then.

Terry