It’s Friday! Or Saturday…or whichever day you’re reading this on. Any day is good for some questions and answers of the Chestnut kind…

Starting with an easy one again this week, about whether to use a sanding sealer underneath Hard Wax Oil. That’s a resounding ‘no’, oils need to penetrate the timber and using a sealer first will dramatically impede this.

Still with sealers, someone else asked about putting Microcrystalline Wax on wet wood; the problem here is that the wax needs a sealer to work at its best and sealers don’t always have enough flexibility in them to cope with any timber movement without cracking. WoodWax 22 straight onto the wood would have been fine, in the end we suggested using an oil (which is more flexible) as a sealer and applying the wax over that.

I’ve mentioned about the curing times of lacquers before, and this week we were asked if the curing time affects the packing time – how long something should be left before being put in a box. Generally not, the Melamine Lacquer is the main lacquer that takes a while to cure but it won’t matter if it’s not exposed to the air, but we’d recommend waiting 24 hours before packing to be on the safe side.

We’re sometimes asked about polishing our lacquers using very fine abrasive such as wet’n’dry, and it came up again this week. This is perfectly acceptable with any of our lacquers, just make sure the coats applied were quite thin and that the lacquer is completely dry before attempting this.

I’m going to be a bit cheeky again with our last question this week, although it is a genuine question we were asked; someone has seen various demonstrators wearing one of our embroidered Chestnut Products patches on their turning smocks and asked where they could buy one. We had to disappoint them by saying that they aren’t available to buy…but just ask and we’ll send one out free! If you’d like one for your smock just let us know. While stocks last I should add just in case!

And finally, we put another film on YouTube this week, all about the importance of proper preparation (now why didn’t I think of that as a title??), it’s been very well received, if you’d like to have a look just click the button below.

Next week’s Newsletter will be the last one of the year, we’ll be closed over Christmas and New Year but don’t worry, they will be back!

All the best

Terry