GeneralKayoss
ArboristSite Operative
3-4 light coats of natural danish oil on spalted red maple. Brings more color out with each coat it seems
What are you making with your milled wood?
- Thread starter unclemoustache
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Gorgeous!
Finally got this to the clients/friends in NY who bought it a year ago. Whole process was a textbook case of never assume that large chunks of wood dry outdoors. It started as a roughly hewn section of a live oak trunk, crudely shaped like a really thick bench, that had been sitting in my neighbor's yard for five years. I dragged it over to my place and milled it into a coffee table. One of my friends in NY originally from San Antonio immediately claimed it, wanting a piece of Texas for their New York lakehouse. The wood moved a ton over the next six months even after resin filling the cracks and had to completely relevel it after nine months, and refill cracks. Finally was sure it was done moving and my friends were getting antsy to take possession so managed to ship it with legs on via UPS at a pretty reasonable price considering the box weighed 92 lbs - 62 lb table top, 20 lb legs, 10 pounds of boxing and packing. It's an Asian style table with shallow 6" custom steel flat bar legs I fabricated, so that was why I was able to keep it a pretty small volume box already assembled - 44x24x9, and thus affordable to ship. Volume almost always matters more than weight in ground shipping, which is why I rarely ship assembled tables. Far and away the most interesting piece of wood I've ever worked. Only possible to achieve this look as a result of that extended outdoor weathering process.
Turned out great! Finish?
Varathane water based polyurethane.
Do most Live Oak slabs show all the cool looking darker grain like that?
No, I wish they did lol or I'd mill more. Live oak has a decent looking grain but have never found it remarkable enough to justify the effort of milling such ridiculously hard and heavy wood. That grain seemed a product of the raw chunk I milled it from having five years of weathering outdoors here between extreme heat and cold cycles (and not rotting whatsoever that entire time). Kind of a happy accident being able to salvage it from my neighbor's yard, I would have never kept it lying around in the weather that long doing nothing with it.
Awesome! What a beautiful chunk of wood.
Looks like some of the cracks aren’t completely filled?
Try raising the grain with a Butane torch then sand.
Probably not in the first photo. That was taken before releveling and refilling sometime last year, the first time I "finished" it. I painstakingly tried to get everything the second time around. The spider web cracks are exasperating, they're so thin but so extensive that it takes forever for epoxy to seep down through them so you have to coat it again and again to fill them to surface level. Oak seems to have a different way of cracking than most other woods, at least in the burl-ish sections. Because I don't like epoxy finishes, I don't just coat the whole thing with a ton of epoxy, just around the cracks. I always sand down the wood bare so I can do a water based poly finish or mineral oil/beeswax finish depending on the type of wood (I use water based poly for a clear/non-yellowed finish on lighter woods and minerai oil/beeswax to enrich the grain of darker woods).
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