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Yes, "heavy leaning" was a terrible choice of words, wasn't it?

I would suggest 5 to 10 strokes, with heavy leaning toward the 5 until you get a better sense of it.

Yes, the uncoated cardboard surface that faces the cereal is a nice smooth free (if you eat that crap) surface that works just fine.

Personally, in my opinion only, the balsa is not a good surface...

I suppose you could sand it with whatever degrees of fine sandpaper you have available. You could also take a newspaper and use that to buff the heck out of it. As you said, it comes pretty smooth so...