Chestnut Cut n Polish abrasive paste - 225ml

If you like Yorkshire Grit, you’ll love Cut‘n’Polish.

Yorkshire Grit is now made in America and the price has skyrocketed, not least of all because of the cost of shipping across the Atlantic, so we've stopped stocking it.

Try Cut'n'Polish though - we’ve been selling Chestnut Cut‘n’Polish along side Yorkshire Grit for years. It's just as popular as Yorkshire Grit, and it’s every bit as good.

Chestnut Cut'n'Polish is an abrasive paste which consists of a special blend of abrasive particles and waxes. In use, the abrasive particles break down to ever smaller sizes whilst still retaining their cutting edge, meaning that the paste mutates into a finer and finer abrasive as it works. The blend of waxes lubricates the process throughout, reducing friction and trapping any dust that is generated.

Sand first with traditional abrasives to 240 grit, making sure that all tooling marks have been removed, then stop the lathe and apply a coat of Cut'n'Polish. Start the lathe again, then slowly and steadily work the rotating piece with a cloth or tissue.

The result? A fine surface finish without the need to a host of traditional abrasives.

Buff with a clean cloth or tissue to remove any visible residue. Wood can then be overcoated with wax or oil finishes, whilst acrylics and other resins often don't need any further finishes applied to them at all.

Please note that just like Yorkshire Grit, or any other abrasive paste you may come across (despite what they might want to avoid telling you), the carrier is wax, and therefore it's not a suitable abrasive if you want to apply a chemical finish afterwards, such as lacquers, CA finishes, varnishes and the like. Although you might think in the short term that the effect looks great, chemical finishes will not will adhere properly to wax. Therefore, even if you believe you've thoroughly removed all the wax, a chemical finish applied over an abrasive paste will have no long-term resilience. You can put wax on top of chemical finishes, but you can't put chemical finishes on top of wax.

So, having given words of caution about abrasive pastes in general, it has to be said that Chestnut Cut'n'Polish is brilliant stuff, especially on an acrylic pen blank, and we highly recommend it for the right applications. It eliminates the need for a pile of traditional abrasives because it mutates from a coarse abrasive to a fine abrasive as it works. It is therefore ideal for woods that are going to have a wax finish as a final overcoat, and for resins (including acrylic pen blanks, ebonite pen blanks, and stabilised hybrid pen blanks) that perhaps apart from a topcoat of Microcrystalline wax to keep the fingerprints off, don't need a final overcoat at all.