re: Finex cast iron cookware (with pics)

Matty Matheson is the first one I saw using finex. Love their aesthetic but I’m an antique lodge guy

Lot of beautiful stuff here.

I’ve ground and sanded a lodge. Took a disc on a drill that was like $10 and then used a sander to finish it off. Took probably 30 minutes. I could have kept going and made it better, it’s absolutely a better pan now than what came from lodge. Very smooth. It’s not as nice as some of these higher quality ones, but pretty dang smooth. My wife was furious for like a month because it took forever for it to re season. Now it’s a great pan.

My only point is you are paying extra for the novelty of a very nice pan. Which sometimes is worth it. With the right equipment, a company could do a better job than I did in probably 10 minutes or less of time per pan.

There’s all kinds of YouTube videos. I used a paint stripping ceramic disc on an electric drill because that’s what someone on YouTube recommended first and then used my orbital sander stepped down with 2 or 3 finer pads. An angle grinder would have been better with the proper discs and then a very fine sander.

There may be other better options also. The pan gets a bright shiny silvery aluminum color. My wife was furious lol. After I seasoned it extra well it was still basically that color. After I cooked for like 3-4 days it wasn’t much better. There was a good week I figured I’d have to drop an entire $30 on a new pan for her. Took a lot of cooking to get it slowly black and fully seasoned again.

It’s about as much work as you’d expect if I remember right. It’s been a year or more. Something like 30 minutes. If you have crappy tools it may be longer and know what you are doing it would be faster.

It took the roughness of the lodge down to a very smooth surface. There is still imperfections in the metal, quite a few, that I’m not sure you could grind or at least without considerable effort. So that’s where these higher end pans would be better. That’s likely in the casting process itself. So this removes all of the raised imperfections but there are still quite a few minor sunken blemishes. Maybe better iron?