resawn victorian pine beams - do they age in colour?

They may be dark or light when first cut. They will darken much more quickly than new pine. They should need no staining to give them the old pine colour, just a few months exposure to air and light.

Tim W

Much the same as fresh pine does - and rather better than modern "pine" (which will probably be spruce or hemlock).

It's a light-based effect rather than atmospheric, so shading will affect it.

If they're from Victorian warehouses, docks etc, they're often pitch pine or Douglas Fir, both of which tend to stay reddish and sticky for many years. The "old pine" colour is normally associated with European Redwood, which wasn't normally used for structural purposes in industrial buildings.

thank you, and everyone else, for your help. very interesting.

Robert

I laid a floor last year with boards recut from pitch pine beams. They were a golden reddish colour to start with. Despite being quite resinous they seem to have taken matt PU varnish well.

Cheers Richard

yeah, they will tend to go from light crap to dark s*it over time. All wood seems to do that courtesy of UV and its effect on the wood surface. Least I assume its UV.

Its just that pine is such an ugly cheap wood to start with..

No, most hardwoods will fade in light. Oak in particular.fades, but it's masked by the greater darkening due to oxidation so you'll only notice it where there's shading.

As to the visual qualities of pine, then it depends on the quality of the timber. Old pine is about the only way to get something that looks good.

None of mine has. All gone darker.

or pay through the nose for good pine.

Which a lot of old pine ain't.

And which pine variety are we talking about; Parana Pine (Araucaria angustifolia), Eastern White Pine (Pinus strobus), Western White Pine (Pinus monticola), Limber Pine (Pinus flexilis) or Ponderosa Pine (Pinus ponderosa) and many more?

Some good; some not so good.

None of those.

If your lucky it will be pitch pine, otherwise its probably a vile fast growing spruce.

'Victorian pine' means any old crap evergreen softwood they could more or less pass off as wood ..essentially its the market where today we use chipboard and MDF.

'Look at my lovely retro Elizabethan II Stripped MDF furniture!'

Good wood has always been good wood, and elm, walnut, oak, teak and mahogany (about as bad a word as pine as that covers many species) and even Iroco are 'good woods' as is pitch or parana pine if you must.

Even beech and maple have their place.

crap softwood is suitable for structural purposes, but should IMHO always remain invisible. Under something else, or at least 5 layers of stopper, 2x primer, undercoat and gloss.

Being old is no guarantee of anything except good fortune in that the worm didn't get ALL of it.

Only partially agreed that crap softwood is suitable for structural purposes. Some is so unstable it's barely usable for pallets. On the other hand softwood such as well prepared Common Yew (Taxus baccata) or hardwood such as Balsa (Ochroma pyramidale) have their place in the making of longbows or de Havilland Mosquitos. And yes! If properly prepared, both Pitch Pine (Pinus rigida) and Parana Pine can be very good woods indeed.

Rant ends.

well, yes. You use that for battens,..:-)

Agree that those are the best - yew I had forgot. I love the stuff, though its a bit overpowering for furniture.

But all the 'stripped pine' s**te I have seen is really s*it stiff.

It really was 19th century chipboard. and no better than it should be.

Scandinavian antique pine furniture is different. It's not the species that's crap, it's where it's grown. Hence European Redwood from Wales is crap, but the same species from Finland is dense and tight grained.

Even that depends on the location. Monmouthshire and the Wye Valley is OK, as they're old plantations that have been well-managed for timber. Go West of the Brecons though and it's straggly crap grown on near- vertical hillsides for the grant money.

Joinery grade timber was redwood in Victorian England though Scottish houses used whitepine under boards. Floor boards would have been yellow pine. Nobody would have used parana or much of anything else (not even American Cedar) with the vast quantities of virgin redwood with girths so large that it all looked quarter sawn.

quoted text -

The Forestry Commission was set up to plant spruce following the depredation WW1 made on British forests. Tax laws and various scemes lead to people with little or no idea what they were doing investing in forests. Then selling up when the gravy congealed.

Monoculture has introduced one pest after another so that (as with the spruce bark beetle) all spruce is culled young and thrown out to the low end marketeers. The OP was talking about reclaimed timber. You'd have to look at it before you could guess its age.

If it was floor boarding it would have been fairly soft to start with and then get hammered for 100 to 150 or so many years. Yellow pine is a bland soft pine. But would have originally been intended for use in houses where rugs and carpet slippers ruled.