Replies

1. 
   swenson | Jan 11, 2011 03:07am | #1

   I made a dining room table for my son with the same instructions... he liked the weathered look and so did his wife. I found a source of oak fence boards taken down in Loudoun County, VA. They were not only weathered but had been chewed by horses, had cracks and knots, and the posts I was going to use for the legs had splits and nail holes and open knots. The fence boards had been painted black, as is the custom in Loudoun and the guy who sold them to me had run them thru metal detectors and had dried them and skim planed some sides to let me see grain. I wanted to keep the weathered character but still had to have the boards meet for edge gluing. What I did was choose a good weathered side and jointed that side till it was kinda flat but still had enough weathering showing to be interesting. Then I flipped it and ran it thru the planer till it was 3/4 thick. After glue up I used planes and scraper planes to blend weathered edges on the face to match unweathered edges on the face. It left some dips and hollows, but that is what my son liked. The open knots and cracked knots I filled with Apoxy, a clay and epoxy mix that is used in Hollywood for sculpting props. THE ALIEN creature was made out of this stuff in part. I used black Apoxy and it filled the cracks but it left them looking like empty voids because they were black. Some of the cracks in the legs I left open and some I filled. 

   Here is a mish-mosh of pix of the finished table and some of the weathered parts.  It's three AM and I just grabbed a few in no real order to give you an idea of what I was rambling about above.  Hope this gives you some help.

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1. 
   Rossman | Jan 11, 2011 11:12am | #2

   Thanks Swenson

   Swenson:

   You information and pictures are pointing me in the right direction. I think a little experimantation with whatever wood we choose will lead us to what my customer is after. Did wire brushes come in handy?

   Thanks,

   Ross 

1. 
   swenson | Jan 11, 2011 11:58am | #3

   No wire brushes. The chosen side to be up on the table top was just jointed enough to remove badly unstable wood. The usable weathered wood was just scraped and sanded. If you mean wire brushed to remove bad soft wood.

   If you mean using wire brushes to distress wood, I didn't do any distressing at all.

   For the most part what I had to do, after glue up was to make those places where the weathered wood formed dips below the surface of the adjoining board, make the adjoining board dip too, to meet the weathered dip.

   The problem is, after working for years to make perfect flat tables with no imperfections and great grain match, one now has to do a 180 turn and try not to take too much character off, to try to include rather than avoid things like cracks and knots. The one exception to this was I didn't include any end checking. However, in talking to a woman who has a store in Purcellville, Virginia selling reclaimed wood furniture, she told me of a floor sample she once had with a big crack in one end that was caused by a poor breadboard installation and customers kept asking if their table could have a crack like that too.

   I think the tool I used most on feathering the weathered surface to the unweathered surface was a small scraper plane made by Lie Nielsen, the little one used by fly rod makers to plane segments of fly rods.