Hi

How has your week been? Well, it’s not been a good month for demos for me! As you know, I had to cancel two because of covid a little earlier this month. I was due to go to the Red Rose Club in Preston on Monday. As you may recall, this was the day (along with Tuesday, when I’d have been travelling back) of the severe weather warnings due to high temperatures.
I spoke to the club, and they agreed that it would be foolhardy to attempt to travel up to them, so we agreed to cancel the demo, something I hate doing.
We’ve agreed a new date for next July, hopefully it’ll be third time lucky!
But enough of that, it’s question time!

Here’s an interesting one. There’s no real answer to it, but it does show the difference between two of our products. An email arrived from someone using silicone cups to decant our oils into, so that he could brush them on. When using the Hard Wax Oil he allowed any residue to dry, then by rolling the cup around and gently squashing it, he could make the oil come away from the sides, leaving the cup in perfect condition.
This didn’t work for the Finishing Oil; it wouldn’t delaminate and stayed where it dried. Did we have any thoughts on this?
There are a number of potential factors involved here. Hard Wax Oil is much thicker. More of the product was possibly left behind, so the dried coating was itself probably thicker. The oil dries very hard, and the combination of this makes it less flexible and thus easier to ‘break’, forcing it to come away from the silicone.
Finishing Oil has enough flexibility to allow it to move with the cup, and will cling on to the surface. It’d be interesting to know what happens if a heavier amount of oil is deliberately left in the cup…

Another email this week had me scurrying out into the warehouse to check something. The email asked what we recommend as a brush cleaner after using our Cellulose Sanding Sealer. The answer, of course, is Cellulose Thinners. The reason I’d gone to the warehouse was to grab a can and check this information was on the label, which of course it is.
Two takeaways from this; we spend a lot of time writing and checking the text on our labels; most of the information about using them can be found on them.
I also thought maybe it was time to send out our Solvent Chart again for any new Chestnuteers out there. This is a bit of an exclusive for Newsletter readers only!

The last question that came in is one that we get fairly often – which might or might not surprise you. Can we say how light/dark one of our Spirit Stains is, as it needs to match some existing timber in the house. The answer is, frankly, no. Trying to describe a colour over the phone is next to impossible, and whilst an email or website gives a good indication, this isn’t accurate either. The screen might be old and distorting the colour. And of course, and most importantly of all, the timber itself will affect the final colour. Stains are, by their nature, translucent, so the original colour of the wood beneath will show through. The only way to really be sure it to try some – which is why we produce the sample sets. And although there are some colours in the set that will be totally wrong, it’s worth remembering that the stains are all intermixable and the other colours can be useful to add, perhaps, a red hue or to lighten the shade slightly.
Colour matching is an art, don’t expect to do it first time!

And that’s it for this week. When your next Newsletter arrives I’ll be in Swindon getting ready for the Woodturning Weekender. I hope we’ll be seeing you there, do come and say hello!
But don’t worry, I’ll be here as well!

All the best

Terry