• Hi all and welcome to TheWoodHaven2 brought into the 21st Century, kicking and screaming! We all have Alasdair to thank for the vast bulk of the heavy lifting to get us here, no more so than me because he's taken away a huge burden of responsibility from my shoulders and brought us to this new shiny home, with all your previous content (hopefully) still intact! Please peruse and feed back. There is still plenty to do, like changing the colour scheme, adding the banner graphic, tweaking the odd setting here and there so I have added a new thread in the 'Technical Issues, Bugs and Feature Requests' forum for you to add any issues you find, any missing settings or just anything you'd like to see added/removed from the feature set that Xenforo offers. We will get to everything over the coming weeks so please be patient, but add anything at all to the thread I mention above and we promise to get to them over the next few days/weeks/months. In the meantime, please enjoy!

Oak dining table build (complete, and inside)

Tables need to be laid. When they are, that is the spectacular thing for guests as opposed to makers. L, aka Mrs Mike, will transform it. Top job Mike. And in time for Christmas. Superb.
 
I can understand your unhappy thoughts re the colour even though it looks extremely good to me Mike, I wouldn’t do anything too hasty, live with it and it may very well become something you like, also if you must change things I’m sure you know to prepare some pieces exactly as you have the top so that you can experiment on them.
I once added a small amount of ebony wood dye to another dye and the effect was most pleasing, the black didn’t turn the other dye it was added to darker it stayed separate and seemed to get lodged in the grain, I mention this as it may just add the darkening you want without changing what you have? Perhaps a tiny amount could be added to your triple 1 mix for a final coat?
 
+1 for living with it for a bit. I'm no finishing expert, but I do know that finishes "mature" and it doesnt necessarily take years.
Top job, by the way, excellent.
S
 
Thanks guys, I appreciate the thoughts. I suspect that the colour issue will go away in a short time as the light changes, and as the table matures. It will also never likely be bare again, so it's at its harshest now. The melancholy is perhaps because I had wanted an instant triumph, and it's not quite that. I will have to do the chairs and the court cupboard in the same finish, and then it won't look like a big dark thing in the middle of the room, but will just be a part of the bigger picture.

Oh, and one thing I really did get right was the the planed finish of the top, and the rounded-over arises of the boards of the top. They look great.
 
I think it looks superb. Can you add some photos of the finished under structure?

When we see very old dark oak furniture, wood panelling, church fixtures etc., is that stained or has it darkened naturally over 100s of years?
 
NickM said:
I think it looks superb. Can you add some photos of the finished under structure?
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Thnks Nick. Yep, I'll grab some later.
NickM said:
When we see very old dark oak furniture, wood panelling, church fixtures etc., is that stained or has it darkened naturally over 100s of years?
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I think this is a really interesting question, and I've never heard a satisfactory answer. If you leave oak unfinished and untouched for hundreds of years, it goes grey. So, something else has happened to it to make it dark. Is it a finish, or is it just regular polishing (or washing)? Is it smoke, or damp? I simply don't know, and neither do the books I have on the subject of ancient oak furniture. I think that if I ever get to the V&A Museum I'll try and find a curator and pick his brains on the subject.
 
Well, oak goes darker when it is exposed to ammonia, that is what the fuming process is. But oak in stables is also black and nobody put those beams in a fuming tent. The ammonia there is given off by the horse muck.
As to the silver-grey colouring, my guess is that it is simply oxidation. I can't think what else it could be. If you do find a different explanation, please do let us know.
S
 
Am I right in thinking that in very old oak pieces that have inside surfaces (eg inside drawers or cupboards) those parts stay much lighter in colour?

And if a table is 500 years old, for the first 400 years it will have been exposed to plenty of indoor smoke, from lamps and candles and open fires.
 
Linseed oil turns very dark brown over long periods of time—like hundreds of years. Add in some smoke, dust, and oils from human skin and I bet you’ve got a good recipe for nearly black wood.
 
Well done. It looks great. Perfect proportions for the room.
In a month I will be wishing I wrote down the exact combination of stain and grain filler on my table. When I get to applying finish to my chairs.
 
Imho the piece should be glued in as it looks like a natural blemish.
Perhaps fill the cracks shallow with clear resin then sand back the surfaceto match
Left out it looks more like a regrettable cutting error
Imho- looking in from the outside and knowing little of the effort invested.
 
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Mike G said:
Thnks Nick. Yep, I'll grab some later.

I think this is a really interesting question, and I've never heard a satisfactory answer. If you leave oak unfinished and untouched for hundreds of years, it goes grey. So, something else has happened to it to make it dark. Is it a finish, or is it just regular polishing (or washing)? Is it smoke, or damp? I simply don't know, and neither do the books I have on the subject of ancient oak furniture. I think that if I ever get to the V&A Museum I'll try and find a curator and pick his brains on the subject.
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The V&A is a good idea. I was there two weeks ago. I should have asked!

One of the reasons I ask is that I regret not staining the hymn board I made for a local church. I didn't really want to disguise the fact it's new, but it really does stick out like a sore thumb! My hope is that it will blend in after a couple of hundred years!
 
kirkpoore1 said:
Linseed oil turns very dark brown over long periods of time—like hundreds of years. Add in some smoke, dust, and oils from human skin and I bet you’ve got a good recipe for nearly black wood.
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I made a bread board when I was at Edward Barnsley and oiled that with vegetable oil (for food safety reasons). That seems to have gone quite dark after a couple of years. I can imagine linseed doing something similar.
 
I've read somewhere that although woodworkers have routinely applied linseed oil to their planes for at least a couple of centuries, museum curators now avoid using it, because of the way it eventually darkens.
 
Andy P sent me a link to this site, where a similar discussion took place regarding the colour of old oak. It makes interesting reading.
 
Mike G said:
It's too red. In trying to deal with that, I made it too dark. Now it's both too dark and too red.
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The table looks fine, and I'd say a very good job. A bit of green aniline dye added to the Van Dyke brown would have knocked the red back a bit: that doesn't seem obviously necessary to me but I'm, of course, only looking at a photo. Slainte.
 
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