5k Year Old Bog Oak Table: Digging up 4k-year-old trees for furniture
blog.lostartpress.com
blog.lostartpress.com
They used to dig up $200 million worth of timber a year, mostly exported to China, until the government cracked down on exports. It's illegal to export unfinished native timber, so exporters exploited a loophole by cutting the trunks into "tabletops", or adding basic carvings and labelling them as "totem poles", and then shipping the logs to China for further processing.
[1] https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/giant-ngawha-swamp-kauri-log-d...
https://thestandard.org.nz/the-strange-case-of-oravida-and-t...
That said, the added labor ensures a more finished product is exported. Was that the intent, or was the intent to force the wood to stay in NZ?
Firewood is a thing. Something like 8-10% of UK electricity (2017) came from firewood harvested in the US.
https://www.pri.org/stories/2018-06-20/uk-s-move-away-coal-m...
It’s worth googling images of swamp kauri if woodworking is your thing, the logs are truely massive.
The article you linked to is a bit woo-woo, especially with all the Douglas Adam's stuff and the number 42. The article did not link to the scientific paper, which is an interesting read. It seems to be open access, so check it out[1].
The concern is that a raw material export based economy is bad for the people who live in the country because most of the value is extracted from the country and only the most unskilled jobs are left.
This type of resource extraction was a hallmark of the colonial era, which is one reason governments are very wary of it.
Sure there is. Just ban export of wood and wooden items.
Inventing new words doesn't magically absolve you of crimes, you know.
Laws have to be specific, and that is the issue. If you can perform a minimal treatment to the object under the law, then it can be transmuted under the law and the spirit of the regulation is sidestepped.
Reason, judgement, and consensus must be part of the process.
To ban the export of unprocessed domestic wood, is it preferable to pre-define and include every possible "process" or is it better to have judges who asses whether any given would-be export is "processed"?
Also, lets skip the argument of regulatory capture/neglect by just agreeing that government transparency/accessibility and voter enfranchisement are critically important to maintaining any reasonable consensus-based system.
I don't see a solution; the obvious choice of trying to make the law more specific and thus less reliant on judgement gets us back to the idea you are opposing.
A murder is an unlawful killing.
But even if you can't find or afford anything like that, if you are ever remodeling, it's worth reusing weathered but intact lumber from your house when possible.
I pulled and reused about 50 ft of existing redwood 2x6 off my house recently as part of a remodel, refinished it with shou sugi ban (Japanese wood burning technique) and built a new gate structure with it, and it turned out beautiful.
A majority of old finish lumber in the U.S. has been painted with lead based paint. Unfortunately the safest thing to do with this lumber is throw it away.
Also in many homes floorboards have been covered with asbestos containing adhesives when newer floors were laid on top.
You should still be careful about selecting and working with pallet wood. They can be subject to hazardous spills and can have random debris embedded in them that will damage blades.
I checked a few of the pallets where I work; they're heat treated, no chemical treatment. But! While I'd feel safe using the pallets used to ship corrugate bundles, the pallets used to ship the sketchy drums of mystery chemicals look identical and end up in the same trailers headed off to some pallet recycler.
I keep forgetting to check the CHEP pallets.
https://blog.lostartpress.com/2020/07/07/updated-anarchists-...
They are my go-to for woodworking reading material.
Another similar thing is water logged trees - they pull trees which sat for centuries in Slovakia's lakes. They fill the cracks with metal (bronze).
A bonus point it's that the table becomes a "story".
Pretty much everything in the house needs to have a "story", which is more important than the actual thing.
I live a fairly "minimalist" lifestyle (I don't subscribe to the ideas of minimalism, the Swedish "Lagom", "just the right amount", is closer), so I can spend more on fewer items, maintain them and have more time selecting, making or commissioning them.
When you can already buy the best possible thing then the story is what matters.
> “Even the dog wouldn’t—” “But humans will, Mr. Bent,” said Moist. “And therein lies genius. I think he makes most of his money on the mustard, but there’s a man who can sell sizzle, Mr. Bent. And that is a seller’s market.” - Making Money - Sir Terry Pratchett.
[0] https://www.brewerygulchinn.com/the-history-of-the-inn
[1] https://media.expedia.com/hotels/1000000/900000/894100/89401...
It’s basically two grifters from Iowa who take the good stuff from hoarders, and collectors.
This one guy (Jersey John) pull out a 1886 Windsor chair, and acting like he’s doing the owner a favor by offered the guy $25. The owner shot back with, “I can get $40 at a yard sale?”
Anyhoo—it just reminded me how far we have gotten away from buying beautiful handmade things that will last forever, and going with junk make in the cheapest country.
selection bias. all the cheap junk your grandparents bought was disposed of before you were born. you never even saw it.
Plus, 140 year old furniture takes specialized maintenance if you want them to last. It's kind of expensive to properly maintain or refinish antique furniture. Chairs, especially, need proper maintenance, they experience much more wear than something like a chest, and an improper fix can destroy it.
But actually fixing a break does take skill. If you're lucky the pieces will mate back together seamlessly and you can use wood glue and maybe some wax to get the piece looking like new and just reassemble them. But if the break is not clean, or there has been a previous repair (maybe involving screws or nails) then replicating a piece is pretty difficult. Turning a new piece requires a lathe, color matching stains is definitely a skill you acquire through experience.
Chips on surfaces and the like pretty much require you to have a decent collection of veneer on hand, in order to luck out and find something with similar grain patterns.
I do a fair bit of antiquing and (proper) refurbishing of old furniture (not 'upcycling'). It's not for the faint of heart. It's a time-consuming labor of love that's akin to maintaining a classic car.
I used to live out in the woods and had to haul my garbage to the dump every few months. (I didn't want to burn plastic, like some of my crazy neighbors did.)
The city dump changes seasonally. After Christmas, there are piles of old toys that were replaced. After summer, there are hundreds of discarded blue-plastic kid pools. After fall there is a TON of furniture. I have no idea why: do people buy more furniture in the fall in preparation for holidays?
Anyway, I see more cheap furniture from Target and department stores than I do IKEA. Ikea is inexpensive furniture, but vastly better than Walmart, Target, Sam's Club, etc. So I didn't see a lot of IKEA at the dump.
IKEA absolutely sells cheap furniture made of laminated MDF, and it's often half the price of the quality stuff. And it's not fair to lambast IKEA for sacrificing quality to hit a price-point when they do allow people to pay more to better stuff.
The step up from the good IKEA tier is a big step. Even cheap hardwoods like oak are a lot more expensive than s/p/f. And that's not even getting into how much more wear hardwoods put on tooling or the weight difference.
If it's used correctly, MDF is a fine material for furniture. The key to quality pieces with it seems to be in the finish. A piece that's primed, painted with high quality, durable paint, then sealed/lacquered will last a good long while.
Veteran's Day furniture sales :)
Students moving into new places/moving out and going home.
IKEA has been around longer than millennials have.
And some IKEA products last forever.
Don't need to own a car, just use Uber! Don't need to own your servers, just provision (rent) them from AWS! etc.
Wonder when it'll apply to furniture?
Just the raw wood material probably costs a fortune. Given the fact there aren't many people that can produce anything out of it I assume that the prices are astronomical.
From the article: 72 lbs/ft^3. Estimating the table width at 6', and thickness at 2", that would be a total weight of 3096 lbs. Plus a healthy non-zero for the legs and other supports.
If you carry the tabletop (legs and trusses removed) with 24 people, 12 on a side, one every 4 feet, that would be 129 lbs each. OSHA would not approve.
You could probably find 24 people at a woodworking school who are up for the challenge. It might be harder to find a place to put a 43' table in the first place!
Attempting to find out the per gram price of something bought in a kilogram bundle, I simply divided the kilo price by 1000. This is where it got confusing. I was told there are only 985 grams in a kilo. Me: huh?? It's literally the definition of the word kilogram, 1000 grams.
Fucked up maths: 1kilo = 2.2lbs * 16oz * 28g = ~985g
Further discussion on 1oz = 28g and least significant digit only made matters worse. Apparently, this is the standard on purchasing of items sold in kilograms.
That sounds like nonsense. Standard where? What items? In countries that just use the metric system, there would be no conversion to pounds and ounces (most people would have to look up how to do it).
Lots of in between the lines intentionally left for the reader. No, I'm not in a country that normally uses kilo for weight. There are not many things sold by the kilo in non-metric using countries, but some items are regardless.
Trust me, I've already had this argument until I was blue in the face. It doesn't change the fact that this still occurs.
One of the image captions states 18 people carried a single slab, so there's no way 24 would carry the full table, even without doing the maths.
But I feel fairly confident that there are UK-localized versions of each.
> One of the image captions states 18 people carried a single slab, so there's no way 24 would carry the full table, even without doing the maths.
That does not follow. 18 people make many carrying jobs easier, but they are not necessarily all required.
However, since the four tabletop planks are not joined into a single piece, it is clear that 12 people on a side is not a reasonable approach.
If the tabletop is removed from the support structure, then 12 people make multiple trips with each plank, at 65 lbs per person, per plank.
If the tabletop is not removed from the support structure, and we conservatively estimate legs etc at 50% of the tabletop weight, for a total weight just about 2.3 (US/short) tons ... you would need 66 people, properly distributed, to stay within the OSHA recommended lifting maximum of 70 lbs each.
To get 66 people around that table, they would need to be about 3 feet apart, which is just barely adequate working space.
Fortunately we don't move things like this using people. Not even in the UK!
> “Don’t ever underestimate a craftsman,” he emphasizes, “because they’re highly disciplined, highly trained, very determined individuals. I’m a real advocate of traditional apprenticeships. I don’t think you could be good at this job other than by doing it as an apprenticeship. Doing it as an apprenticeship teaches you humility. One of the people I worked with said, ‘Somebody who never made a mistake never made anything.’ Processing bog oak went so wrong, so often; you could take the view that it’s a waste of time. Or you can say, ‘I’ve applied myself to this in the wrong way, so what can I do to do it right?’ A craftsman accepts that they’ve made a mistake. Then, rather than saying, ‘That’s a stupid idea,’ or ‘This is impossible,’ they say ‘What did I do wrong and what have I got to do to make it work?’”
chef's kiss this is sage and serious advice, well told
Really interesting read I didn't expect to see this morning.
Seems like the consensus is mixed. It might be a sleeper tone wood for a specifically-tuned instrument?
Either way, the results can be quite pretty...
https://www.brentrup.com/page2/page2.html
https://www.flickr.com/photos/ruby1638/21176740531/in/album-...
https://reverb.com/item/9428705-brand-new-avalon-a1-oak-cara...
One of the criticisms leveed against it was in line with your dismissal of white oak—because of it's structure there's more damping than a rosewood but it's otherwise bright just with a fast decay. So I suppose that lends itself well to specific playing styles. Not a standout (aside from maybe looks and rarity), but not useless either.
Found a clip: https://www.flickr.com/photos/ruby1638/21176740531/in/album-...
As for tone wood, its very existence is mired in controversy. This is probably not the time or place to get into it!
For the scale they are doing, they might be able to set up a more customized solution. For example, a router attached to some guide tracks like a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pantograph
It's usually done by machine, but the traditional process is manual of course.
It seems like a beautiful but laborious process that is mostly applicable to a very high effort piece like this.
https://www.thefenlandblackoakproject.co.uk/blog/quarter-saw... for diagrams of the plank cuts.
https://www.thefenlandblackoakproject.co.uk/blog/2019/11/1/s... for a description of the main plank configuration.
I got confused by the shot of them carrying a plank, thinking it was the rough full top.
I work with wood, and I'd like to think the answer is yes. While bog oak does have a special beauty to it (I can't think of another wood that's similar), most wood species have their own special qualities, and I wouldn't say that bog oak is inherently any more beautiful than walnut/cherry or many other varieties.
Bog oak is notable for its rarity and difficulty in handling. This drives up the cost and makes it coveted. But beauty really is in the eye of the beholder.