All,
Maybe this is a silly question, but what do you do with Black Walnut sap wood?
Received a fair amount of 4/4 rough stock that from a supplier that outwardly appears to not contain sap wood (steamed?), but when the stock is jointed and surface planed is all or mostly sap wood. Do I cull the piece and chock it up to waste, or do I use the piece and attempt to dye the sap wood to match the surrounding Walnut? It’s kind of a bumber..
Thanks for your help..
Replies
I use walnut to make gun display cases and always end up with a little sapwood in some of the boxes. I don't think it is unattractive if it is balanced; in other words, if the boxes contain sapwood on one side, make the lids from same board, showing approx same amount on same side.
You might be interested in an article in FWW #161, "How to Conceal Sapwood". It mentions using gel stains, dyes and glazes. Specifically for walnut the author uses a yellow dye stain to neutralize the wood, then applies a Vandyke brown non-grain-raising dye. GP
BOBABEUI,
This might not apply to your problem, but how about completing your project then bleaching all the walnut. Then apply your choice of stain to bring up whatever color you desire. Ken
Take it back to the supplier and get what you paid for.
PlaneWood by Mike_in_Katy (maker of fine sawdust!)
PlaneWood
The way I look at wood is it was made for us to use by our creator so we must be creative in how we use it. I made a laptop desk for my wife out of walnut and it had a knot with a small hole in it about 3/4 down to the left of the writing surface. My Dad about went nuts because I didn't fill it. My wife loves it and it has a character that most people would have tried to conceal. I use wood how I get it and count on the character of the wood to help with the final peice. I however am not doing work for others and only give my work away instead of selling it so most don't complain.
Tony
Right on! The wood was given to us to use "as is." I just love to use things as God intended. Have you ever been to the furniture store and looked a some great looking stuff. First they cut all the natural knots and holes out of it...then they beat it with hammers and chains to give it the distressed look? IMHO that looks like junk to me. I use sap wood as long as it is stable and in good taste.
Jim
I've had good luck blending walnut sapwood by staining with a dye made from ground walnut husks. I like to use it because in my opinion it gives a much more natural look to the wood and results in a deep rich color. There's a recipe in Sam Allen's book 'Classic Finishing Techniques'. In addition there was an article a year or so ago in FWW that detailed the use of walnut husks as a stain. Although I've never used it a number of folks say that walnut crystals give a similar result. Both can be obtained from Kremer Pigments. Don't have their address or phone number handy but they frequently advertise in FWW.
Please, please don't bleach it. You might as well recycle pallet wood from the dumpster behind HD. Walnut trees just don't get that big so unless you have access to old growth wood you're gonna get sap wood. Commercially kiln-dried walnut is steamed to even out the sap wood, but it destroys the subtle tones of color. If the sap wood is creamy instead of grey and there's chocolate and purple highlights chances are you've got air dried walnut. If you need to blend in the sap wood, get a color wheel and large & small round artist brushes. In natural light match the color and get the required waterbase Transtint dyes. Mix them weak and sneak up on the base color. Then use the darker color and do some graining with the small brush. If you use a hair dryer to force dry the dye this will only take a few minutes. Finish anyway you please. In direct sunlight the highlights will fade over time, but you might as well enjoy them while they last. You'll be the only one who knows where the sap wood is.John O'Connell - JKO Handcrafted Woodworking
Life is tough. It's tougher if you're stupid - John Wayne
John,
Thanks, I could never bring myself to bleach Walnut.. I think I will give dye route a go as you and others have suggested...
I understand how you feel about bleaching. But, it's a very common solution in the furniture industry for evening out sapwood and heartwood.
Someone suggested VanDyke brown and Jon mentioned walnut husk stain - essentially the same thing. I think that's the way I'd go since it's a natural Walnut color.
Regards,
Kevin
The Independent Voter.com
"Rather fail with honor than succeed by fraud" - Sophocles.
If by "the furniture industry" you mean mass-produced furniture I'd agree and add that most of what they do is the anthisis of what most of us here perceive as fine woodworking. There is a huge distinction between what may be alder with a walnut finish and an actual piece of walnut.John O'Connell - JKO Handcrafted Woodworking
Life is tough. It's tougher if you're stupid - John Wayne
>>I understand how you feel about bleaching. But, it's a very common solution in the furniture industry for evening out sapwood and heartwood.
Can you tell me how you come by that information? I spent over twenty years manufacturing and distributing furniture, and I have been in a lot of big factories, and have worked with the major wood finish suppliers, and nowhere in that career did I encounter anyone bleaching wood as part of a production finishing operation. I didn't even think it was feasible until Jeff Jewitt showed me an excerpt from an old production woodworking text that described a process.
Do you have any specific knowledge of any large manufacturer currently usnig bleach in its finishing schedule?
In my experience, blonding and blow-up stains are a much more efficient way of producing "bleached" effects, and "sap staining" with NGR stain is the most common way of evening out heartwood and sapwood, along with toning just before topcoating. But then, I could be wrong. If I am, please enlighten me.
Michael R.
Can you tell me how you come by that information?
It's from an article in a woodworking magazine that I have. The article is about commercial finishing techniques. The mention of bleaching is only one of several listed approaches used by commercial finishing operations. I forget the authors name 'cause my memory sucks. He's a big name, though. I'm sure you'd recognize the name. I'll try to remember to look it up tomorrow and post it for you.
I only spent about 3 years in commercial, mass produced furniture. And I must confess that I never saw any bleaching. But then again.... we didn't work with anything that had such a stark contrast between sapwood and heartwood.
It's been 15 years since I last worked in a furniture factory. I have no idea what they are doing these days in terms of finishing. One of my Uncles and a nephew have worked in commercial furniture in North Carolina for a long time. But... I haven't spoken to either of them since I was a kid. It might be interesting to see if I can get an email address or something and ask what sort of finishing operations they're doing these days.
Regards,
Kevin
The Independent Voter.com
"Rather fail with honor than succeed by fraud" - Sophocles.
>>I'll try to remember to look it up tomorrow and post it for you.
I'd appreciate that very much. One of us is wrong (me or the writer), and I'd like to know which. I hate to put forth incorect information. The text that Jeff showed me was using 50's technology, and I can see a possibility that bleaching might have been done in some factories producing, say, blonde mahigany finishes. I have worked on a lot of furniture and have never seen any that was bleached, although I have seen plenty from the 50's with blonding stains. ( Jeff says he has worked on some that had been bleached.) But I have been active in the industry since 1970, and I haven't heard of anyone using bleach in that time. Wood and veneers are selected for color, and the occasional dark street is handled with blowup stain, and light streaks of sapwood are tinted to match with sap (NGR) stain.
>>we didn't work with anything that had such a stark contrast between sapwood and heartwood.
Nowadays, wood is usually selected for the color of its heartwood, so lghter sapwood can be stained to match. It doesn't make any sense to bleach unless you want the overall color to be lighter than the normal color of the heartwood.
Michael R
The author was Bob Flexner writing in the Sept. 2001 issue of Woodshop News. The Article is titled "Imitating factory finishes" and he lists 4 common methods that factories use to "uniform" the color of the wood. Bleaching is the first method he lists, followed by Sizing, Equalizing/Sap staining, and Pre-staining... in that order.
I worked for three different furniture manufactorers and none of them used bleaching. But... between the three, the only species of wood being used were Pine, Alder and White Oak - all light colored woods that stain relatively evenly and wouldn't need the color of the wood itself to be uniformed anyway. None of my custom fixture experience since then has involved the need for bleaching either. Like you, I have used NGR dye to even out sapwood on veneers on occasion (on fixtures/custom pieces, not furniture). But, that's about it.
Regards,
Kevin
The Independent Voter.com
"Rather fail with honor than succeed by fraud" - Sophocles.
>>The author was Bob Flexner writing in the Sept. 2001 issue of Woodshop News. The Article is titled "Imitating factory finishes" and he lists 4 common methods that factories use to "uniform" the color of the wood. Bleaching is the first method he lists, followed by Sizing, Equalizing/Sap staining, and Pre-staining... in that order.
Flexner's book "Understanding Wood Finishing" is an excellent comprehensive primer on finishing, and I respect him very much for the work that he has done. That said, there are a few areas where I disagree with him, mostly on industrial finishing techniques, vocabulary, and choices of equipment. Nothing major, and nothing relevant to most people who read his book. In fact, I recommend the book to anyone who wants to learn the basics of finishing.
Since I have been designing and applying factory and custom finishes for over thirty years now, I will say that my experience is contrary to his. Factory finishing schedules often include wash coating (sizing?), sap stain, blowup stain, and color adjustment and blending during the early steps, but bleaching is pretty rare in factory environments. That said, I will continue to check into the subject with my friends in the industry. If I find anything that contradicts my experience, I'll post it in a new thread.
Michael R.
DP, I use the same walnut husk stain technique. It yields a chemically identical pigmentation. The ammonia leaching method I use for extracting the pigment out of the husks doesn't appear to transfer any of walnut's air dried magenta highlights, but these highlights are fugitive over the long term patina process in walnut anyway...and, as John has mentioned, they are already pretty much cooked out of commercially processed, steamed & kilned walnut right from the get-go.
So, the long and the short of it is, touch up tinting of walnut is a much easier and more certain prospect than trying to do it with a wood like cherry, where the patina process virtually never stabilizes.
Jon,
Out of 100 bf of FAS Walnut how much sap wood is a tolerable percentage? I have bought Walnut from two different suppliers (very repeable and well established), the Walnut from supplier 'A' has very little sap wood maybe less than 5%, the shipment from supplier 'B' has at least 20% maybe more..
I find it varies with board width. Shorts and random width boards have less, wide boards will have more. John O'Connell - JKO Handcrafted Woodworking
Life is tough. It's tougher if you're stupid - John Wayne
Bob, I think John's insight in post #13 is accurate. I've bought and sold a lot of commercial, steamed KD walnut over the years when I was the hardwood buyer for my family's lumber business...In my time in the business, I witnessed a steady decline in the quality of walnut. It got to where I was happy to see a load with only about 10% showing some obvious sapwood edges.
The problem with walnut is that this species converts it's wood tissue to heartwood very slowly. A walnut tree attains commercial size well before this process fully develops and even logs as much as 24" in diameter will have a 4" sapwood band. As we continue to cut less mature trees in order to meet demand the worse this problem becomes.
Personally, I use very little commercial walnut in that this is one species where I much prefer air dried stock, even at the expense of trimming off the sapwood. I don't waste the sapwood entirely, since I often use it for design prototypes and knickknacks. It's lack of pigmentation certainly doesn't distract from its working properties. I've even used it as a "blond" accent wood in some pieces.
Jon,
Thank you for your insight..
Interestingly supplier 'A's Walnut has much better figure, very little sap wood and is much much wider lumber.. But alas, the wood does not seem as stable as supplier 'B's wood, it is also much narrower and contains plenty of sap wood..
Hi Jon,
is there a change in the rules regarding Walnut?
My favorite sawmill used to cut off any sap wood and toss it into the slab wood pile.. They also used to sell black walnut cheaper than white oak..
Now they have so many buyers for their black walnut that accept sap wood without degrading it that all the black walnut they sell has sap wood in it..
now days the price of Black walnut is twice the price of white oak or $1.60 a bd.ft. for FAS That plus I had to wait for over three months for them to find some decent 19 foot long logs that could provide me with the required 2x12's.
previously I could call them by Tuesday and have the wood on Friday!
An old sawyer once told me that soaking walnut logs in the mill pond for a year would convert all the sapwood. I've never had the opportunity to try it and I've often wondered it is true.
BJGardening, cooking and woodworking in Southern Maryland
BJ, in walnut, the chemical precursors of this species pigmentation are present in the sapwood. But as for how effective cold water soaking is in causing them to convert, steam is by far the better method. Tests have shown that when walnut is steamed the heat is the primary trigger in causing the color conversion, more so than the moisture. It was once thought that it was the moisture in the steam that caused the pigments in the heartwood to migrate into the sapwood, but this appears to be the lesser of the two benefits in steaming walnut.
The downside to soaking walnut for long periods of time is that it tends to pick up a bacterial infection that, in turn, produces a powerful stink.
>>"is there a change in the rules regarding Walnut?"<<
Frenchy, I'm retired now and not up to speed on grading like I used to be...but walnut is treated a little differently than most of our domestic hardwoods in terms grading. Thinner face veneers are allowed and whether by rule or simply by practice the minimum size clear cuts within grades has always seemed to be tighter. Actually, over the past decade or so the cost and availability of walnut, relative to other domestic hardwoods like maple and cherry, has been about as good as it has been in my memory (since WW II)...Probably as a result of the popularity of lighter colored woods for interior trim and cabinetry...but I think that fad is beginning to shift back again.
...As for 19 foot FAS 2 X12s, I think only in Minnesota could that dream still seem plausible...Serves you right, letting the railroads in up there. Now you're going to have to live in the modern world. :O)
Railroads? what are they? heck we're so modern nowdays that the stage makes a regular weekly run to the rest of the civilized world.. who would ever need one of those new fangled railroads?
Actually I think it's world markets that are finding Minnesota as a market source for hardwoods.. It was around the turn of the last century (late 1800's) when most of our naturally growing softwoods like pine etc. were all harvested off.. I remember reading that by the 1920's in Wisconsin they were harvesting trees as small as 6 inch since most of the old growth hadbeen logged off. The hardwoods that replaced it are just now coming to full maturity and thus Minnesota and Wisconsin are beginning to supply some of the worlds hardwoods. (speculation on my part) We have an advantage that other locations don't have. with relatively low populations and the unsuitablity for the land to be used for much else (it's hard to raise wheat on a steep hill) land is still relatively modest in cost. (It's not uncommon for some timberland to sell for 300 an acre after harvesting the timber..)
Frenchy, I think you're right about the logging cycle up there. Not so much in the case of black walnut, since you're almost beyond its native ranch...but northwestern Wisconsin and northeastern Minnesota are becoming good sources for cherry and maple...especially some very good quality cherry. In terms of its ecological niche, cherry is a "nurse tree" in that it quickly occupies cut over lands up there (along with aspen as you progress northward), once the climax softwood species (red and white pines) are removed. Some of the nicest cherry I've ever seen I bought from a mill up there a little over a decade ago. It takes cherry a little longer to mature in that climate, but when it gets there the texture/figure and pigmentation is fantastic.
Thanks for the tip
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