Pair of Oak Dishes - February 2011

This is a series of posts regarding some past projects of mine.  These were just completed last week, so this will most likely be the last post on past projects.

A co-worker took down an oak tree in his back yard this past fall and gave me some of the wood. I haven't done anything with it until this, quite honestly because I really don't want to cut up such a hard wood with non-power saws. I finally cut up a piece of a smaller log and made a pair of shallow dishes, one slightly larger than the other and having a slight lip. Here they are with no finish.

I saw a technique in an video and decided to try it out. I took a small amount of vinegar and shredded a piece of a steel wool pad, then let it soak for 3-4 days. Bubbles would form in the steel wool over time, so I'd give the jar a little shake whenever walking by. After straining it through a coffee filter to get rid of the steel, this is the result.

I painted it on the smaller dish and according to the video, it reacted chemically with the tannins present in oak. (I'd really like to know the specifics of the chemistry at work here, as well as why the solution with no steel wool in it continued to darken for another week and now looks like red wine.) I then finished both dishes with a 1/3 BLO, 1/3 poly, and 1/3 thinner for the first coat, signed them with sharpie, then applied several coats of 1/2 poly and 1/2 thinner via wiping, scuffing with a scotch-brite pad between coats. A coat of Trewax rubbed into the surface with another scotch-brite pad and buffed off with a paper towel made the finish super-smooth. (This is my standard finishing regimen - the BLO in the first coat really brings out the grain; eliminating it from future coats makes for a faster drying finish.) Here are the results - nobody I've shown them to so far can believe that they're two halves of the same piece of log, even though many saw both dishes unfinished.