Greetings!
I just finished a Shaker shelf made with Flame Birch....this is my first time using this type of wood....any suggestions on how to finish it? ......I am interested in something that will bring out the figure the best. I have very limited scrapwood to test with....
Thanks in advance....
Frank
to finish it? ......I am interested in something that will bring out the figure the best.
Try TransTint Honey Amber (#6001) in a denatured alcohol solution. It comes as a concentrated dye. Depending on the size of the project, I usually half fill a bottle with alcohol and add the dye dropwise (shaking it to mix it) until I get the color intensity I want. You can keep testing it until you get what you want.
After the dye has dried you have several choices --- tung or "boiled" linseed oil or a mixture of equal parts, linseed oil, varnish, and turpentine. Let that dry. Wax it with clear Briwax or Butcher's Bowling Alley wax.
It will really make the figuring jump out.
Bet my recipe looks pretty close to Joel's in the end.
I bult an entire desk top out of flame (as in on fire!) birch I was lucky enough to come across. I sanded to 400 and got it all as smooth as possible.
Clean with a tack cloth with some thinner on it (no paper towels, socks or flannel) made of an old T shirt or something along those lines. All cotton, white, no synthetics materials or blends to dissolve or leach color.
To light off the grain, I used a formula I got right here about 7-8 years ago. Equal parts of boiled linseed oil, 3# cut shellac (Zinzeer blond for me) and pure gum turpentine. (Pure gum as opposed "turpentine" made out of who knows what). Stirred well, put in the kitchen to sit overnight and then used the next day.
I put it on with a clean bristle brush pretty heavily and then wiped any excess off. Not much as I rememeber as the wood was raw and this basecoat/finsh is thin. Any place that needed a little more finish was easily handled with a little on a piece of tack cloth. It made that wood spring to life... it pentrated really well, and left the wood with a beautiful honey color to it. All the flame showed beatifully.
Since it was going on desk top, I finished it with 5 coats of satin poly, each coat thinned about 10% with mineral spirits and applied with an 8" pad (no brush strokes).
The surface has worn exceptionally well and still looks great.
Robert
Minwax wipe-on poly if you are not going to change the color. Has the oil the others recommend putting on separately for contrast, and will build to a good finish you can look right into in about four coats on birch. You can see the maple in this picture, couldn't find a birch example.
What is it .I know what birch is but flamed ? Next questions are where do I get it, cost, does someone sell it rough cut, and what so special about it?
Hi Lee,
I get mine in Ashland, NH
"Lee" skrev i melding news:43fb9640 snipped-for-privacy@newspeer2.tds.net...
Can't tell you where to get it, but it grows pretty much everrywhere in temperate climate.
Generally there are two kinds of birch that grows really tall: Silver birch or white birch, the tall, bautiful white birches, swung by people like Robert Frost.
Sadly, they are nothing like bautiful in woodworking, toneless and insignificantly patterned, and often giving a grey tone, no matter what kind of finish you choose.
Then there is this other birch, that grows more squat and thick, altough it also grows as tall, or taler than the white or silver species. Its main to characteristica (for the amateur) are the foot of the stem (which has black surface, more like a pine, on its lower quarter of height) and its twigs that are hanging down, and I mean straight down, the outer half yard or so. Also its branches are much sturdier and thicker than those of white or silver.
Now, it needs a certain height and thickness to develop the flame structure. It usually comes after the tree is full grown, and it seems to be the sheer weight of the top that presses and crushes the wood in the foot of the trunk, giving the waves and firelike pattern to the wood as it continues to grow in width.
Sadly this is also the time when this tree is beginning to develoop a bad core, due to age, and it starts with darkening the colour of the center of the trunk, just before it start to rot.
So, real flame birch is a little hard to come by. My neighbor cut down some really big ones this fall, and I managed to buy off him two rootpieces, each about 10' long and 2' to 3' in diameter. I am really looking forward to spring, whet I get to start turning some bowls from that wood!
PS. The picture in Wikipedia of Silver Birch is not silver birch, but this other kind. I suspect that the naming practice for the different species of birch is rather subject to local practices rather than botanical precision.
Silver or white birch is white or mainly white all the way down to the root.
Bjarte
We have "yellow" birch here in the US, which is prone to grain reversals which produce the flame figure if cut properly. Sadly, I don't have any pictures on this drive of the unspalted stuff, but you can see the curl through the spalt in this log which was rolled for two years on the deck to get even spalting.
A look at the bark shows the thin yellow peeling surface characteristic to the species.
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