Bog oak. Bog oak - modern production technology

Bog oak - beautiful construction material... Its unusual color is very popular. Therefore, it is widely applicable, especially for the production of finishing materials and furniture fittings. It is also used to make various design and household items. For example, a bar of bog oak can be used to make a knife handle, jewelry box, photo frame and much more.

V home conditions A fine bog oak can be obtained, for example, from a block of ordinary oak.

For this we need a simple glass jar: liter or three liter - it all depends on the size of the piece of wood. You will also need simple boot nails. As well as a plastic lid for a can, a hammer, a 10% ammonia solution in a pharmacy, a thin fishing line, a stationery tape. And, of course, our oak material.

This procedure is best done in a well-ventilated area or outdoors.

To begin with, in any place of the bar that is not important for aesthetic use in the future, you need to hammer in a carnation. A short fishing line should be tied to it.

Pour the ammonia solution into the jar as soon as possible. Then you should lower the oak bar into the jar, but so that it does not touch the ammonia solution itself. The ends of the fishing line, which is tied to the stud, must be brought out beyond the edges of the can's hole. Then, very quickly put the plastic lid on the jar. In this case, the lid will press the fishing line, and the block of wood will hang in the jar without touching the ammonia solution, as is necessary according to the technology.

Use stationery tape to glue the fishing line from the outside to the surface of the can. Also tape the lid and jar where they join to prevent even the slightest evaporation of ammonia.

In this position, a jar with a bar of oak should be left for one or three days. It all depends on how light or dark color we want to get the tree.

When opening the can, you should be extremely careful and try not to inhale ammonia vapors, as this can be hazardous to health.

If you keep a block of oak in a jar for more than three days, you get a fairly dark color of the soaked oak. Because ammonia vapors have been in reaction with tannins for a long time. And the longer this happens, the richer the color. In this case, the depth of impregnation of the tree will be up to 1 cm or more.

If it is possible to use sufficiently large glass containers at home, then in this way you can get a fairly decent amount of bog oak. As a result, bog oak can be used for construction purposes on summer cottage... It will look especially beautiful after opening with furniture varnish.

Kappa Beta Phi

Ghost in Berkeley Square

Deep sea fish of the ocean

The Dolphin Mystery. Galileo program

The largest museum in the world

Tokyo has recently opened the National Arts Center. This art museum is the largest museum in the world in terms of size of exhibition ...

Fountains of Peterhof

Petrodvorets is a palace and park ensemble world famous for its fountains. The idea of ​​creating a suburban royal residence, which would not be inferior to Versailles in France, arose from ...

Underwater SPA in the Maldives

The Maldives is a heavenly abode on Earth, enchanting with its elegance, bright summer mood, gentle sea surf and quality service. Huvafen Fushi - ...

How users get to the site

Nowadays, it is very popular to make your own website and earn some profit on it. Someone makes a website for additional income, but ...

How to become a successful businessman

Many would dream of having their own business. But often projects remain unfulfilled, and people continue to go to their unloved low-paying jobs, wanting ...

Monsters of the world

Nessie is not alone in this world. Reports of lake monsters came from the shores of more than three hundred lakes in the world - ...

Smart home of the future

There are an increasing number of inexpensive home communications management devices that can be controlled using the iPhone app. For example, the Nest thermostat. designed ...

Washed wood is a tree that has been in the water for many years, gaining incredible beauty and durability.

Everyone knows that there are valuable tree species, and there are more affordable ones, such as pine or spruce. But there is a very special category of wood - stained. This is a tree that, having lain in water for tens, hundreds, thousands of years, acquires incredible beauty and strength. Let's talk about stained wood.

Washed wood - incredible beauty and durability

Trunks and fragments of trees lying under the water are usually called driftwood. A logical name, given that the tree really turns out to be drowned, has been at the bottom of the sea, lake, river, swamp for decades. It is noteworthy that some of the trunks turn into dust, rot and, of course, cannot be used. But other trees, on the contrary, acquire a truly stone strength.

The most valuable stained wood is oak. This royal tree is already prized for its durability and beautiful texture. After lying under water for at least 300 years, the oak acquires delicate fawn shades. If the tree is black, then it has lain in the reservoir for about 1000 years!

In the pre-industrial era, “black gold” was not called oil at all, but bog oak. Products made from it are practically eternal, they are not susceptible to decay, fungus or mold. They do not need a protective coating, and stained wood looks extraordinarily beautiful.

In addition to oak, larch is considered the most valuable stained wood. No wonder. It is these tree species due to high density they sink, sink to the bottom, where a transformation process takes place under a layer of silt or sand. Even fresh water contains salts that interact with the tannins of wood and help it acquire special hardness and strength.

According to experts, for a tree to really become stained, it must lie under water for at least 40 years. In general, the longer the better, experts say. Ideal places stagnant waters of swamps or lakes are used to obtain stained wood. But a tree that has lain in sea water, soaked in salt, will also be no less durable.

You can make literally anything from stained wood: furniture, parquet, various crafts, figurines and figurines, boxes, billiard cues, pipes, other interior items and even jewelry. This material has no drawbacks, but it is not available to everyone. Stained wood, especially oak and larch, is very expensive! There are several good reasons for this:

• First, it is a rare material. Although, as calculated in the Central Research Institute of Timber Rafting, in the process of transporting tree trunks, about 1% of the total volume of rafting drowns, and about 9 million m3 of firewood has accumulated in the Volga basin. That's a lot, you might say. But finding sunken tree trunks is not easy. In addition, only 50% of all sunken wood can be attributed to business, that is, suitable for further use. And oak among the snags is not more than 5%. In Europe, they have been looking for and raising flooded trees for a long time and purposefully, therefore, it is already very difficult to find driftwood in European countries. Russia still has reserves of this material;
• Secondly, it is technically difficult to lift a tree to the surface. You need special equipment, usually you need the help of scuba divers. The wood becomes heavy, you cannot reach a solid trunk by hand;
• Thirdly, it is not enough to get a snag. It also needs to be dried before use. This takes about a year, and in no case can you accelerate the process, drying should occur naturally;
• Fourthly, it is difficult to process wood that has become very durable; special skills and tools are needed. Not all carpenters take on bog oak.

Therefore, for three kilograms of bogged black oak on the Internet, they often ask for about 2 thousand rubles! Or 200 rubles for one small piece, literally a cube, suitable only for cutting, for example, a knife handle. A finished bog oak comb, such as the one shown in the photo above, will cost more than 12 thousand rubles.

Can you imagine how much parquet made of such material will cost, or kitchen set... Experts compare the cost of a good bogged oak log to the price of a car. Smoked birch, pine, aspen are cheaper - they ask for from 1.5 to 20 thousand rubles per cubic meter, depending on the condition and quality of the wood.

With such prices for stained wood, it is not surprising that manufacturers of furniture and interior items achieve similarity with the help of stains, special impregnations. Yes, this is already an imitation, in terms of strength and hardness such a tree does not differ from an ordinary one, but the color becomes darker, nobler, the structure is emphasized.

Stained wood is an elite material. Only for expensive interiors, yacht finishes, luxury car interiors, furniture that stands in the offices of presidents and managers of large companies.published by

Subscribe to our Yandex Zen channel!

If you have any questions on this topic, ask the experts and readers of our project.

Stained wood, stained oak - unique wood, rare and fabulously expensive. Elite furniture, parquet floors and even jewelry are made from it, which are unusually strong, unique and durable. It is appreciated all over the world and the fashion for it is timeless, like the fashion for gold and diamonds.

But rarely does anyone think about its origin. Rather, there is official information:

For many hundreds of years, oak trunks, sunken during floods or rafting, lie at the bottom of rivers and oxbows. They are partially or completely covered by sand and silt, which means that the wood is largely isolated from oxygen. In such conditions, the tree becomes as strong as stone. There's a change going on in him chemical composition and in doing so it turns out to be processed by such a natural preservative as tannins. Further. Tannins, of which there are plenty of oak wood, enter into chemical reaction with iron salts dissolved in water. After such a complex and long process, the sunken tree is qualitatively transformed. Its wood acquires unique physical properties: it becomes not only durable and durable, but also amazing in color.

But are floods in the past capable of "cutting" so many trees in almost all rivers of the European part of Russia, Ukraine?

My LJ friend tar_s shared his pictures:

Oaks under clay. Central Russia. The tree is stained, it was pulled out in large quantities from the river for construction purposes.
Filmed on the phone. And in order to take a good picture, you have to shoot from the river, from the boat. It can be seen that the oak is as flat as a string and a meter in girth. Above the place where it goes into the cliff, there are four meters of soil - clay with sand. The black earth layer on top is about 15 cm.
Usually they have roots something like this:

So I look at them - no more than 300 years maximum. Rather, less. Pulling them out is, in fact, very difficult. Locals told how the trucks were buried when they were pulling a log from the water, one end of which was in the bottom.
Apparently, the river changed its channel (and there are several oxbows around), and simply washed out the place where the oak grove used to be. I was especially struck by the thickness and evenness of the oak trunk. It is necessary a large number of years to grow up like this; all the oaks in the area are at most 20 cm in girth. And there are no straight lines, all knotty, curved. This suggests that the conditions for the trees were more suitable. For comparison - in that photo a phone case is 12 cm long.
actually there was a ship forest. I do not observe natural dams, trunks evenly stick out along the river, here and there. Rather, as I said, the river washed out the previously covered trees.

The usual version - The river in the forest washes away the trees, they fall and are carried away by the stream. Further, in the whirlpool, they are covered with sand and clay and ... we wait a couple of hundred years. But judging by the amount of it in the rivers, the rivers have washed away all the forests, clean. Leaving nothing to posterity. The depth and condition say that it is several hundred years, if more than 500 - then the tree will already be petrified. I read that in the 19th century there was so much stained wood that it was mined to heat stoves. And this despite the fact that pulling it out is easier to cut down several trees in the forest. But if they didn't cut it, then there were no trees. All photos of the 19th century in Russia say that there was practically no forest. The current forests are about the same - trees, no more than 200 years old. By the way, in the 20th century there was a whole industry of building houses from stained wood - OAK, LARCH, BIRCH AND PINE! How many rivers have washed away the forests? And it was like this - The forests washed away by the wave were washed into the rivers, and carried down by the stream. There were a lot of trees, they made of themselves natural dams, because of which the level of rivers rose locally, sand and clay from the stream were filled up and "cemented". This is confirmed by rocks homogeneous in thickness and content in the layer of covered trees. Tell me, there is something to be seen on this issue in your case.

Such a trunk can only grow in a forest, the thickness is 300 years, we add 200 (let's say), totaling at least 500 years from birth. There are also oak trees over 500 years old. In the European part of Russia, oak trees over 500 years old are practically not found. Single copies maximum. Conclusion - 200-300 years ago, some kind of cataclysm washed a huge number of trees into the water. The question is - what could have done this, then by flushing the uprooted trees into the rivers. I think those trees that did not end up under clay, water and sand without oxygen, bacteria processed a maximum of ten or two years, completely into dust, so there are traces in upper layers on land from trunks and no. Only in clay layers.

I supplement with photographs that I found on the Internet:

If you follow this link, you will see that the following souvenirs are made from this wood:

Extraction of stained wood in Ukraine

Why are they not growing now? We didn’t have time to grow up yet. It takes hundreds of years for oaks to become such giants.

Note that the trunk is broken off at the root. Those. This fact cannot be explained by washing the tree with water during the flood. This tree was broken off by a stream of catastrophic power.

The rarest wood in the world, which is a kind of precious material, is bog oak. A cubic meter of this wood costs an average of $ 2,000. The bog oak has two whole lives, one of which he lives on the ground, and the second under water.

This second life began many centuries ago, when, subject to intergalactic laws, the rivers changed their course. Time washed away the banks, and the trees from the coastal oak forests ended up under water, where they were until an inquisitive person discovered them.

Only in the post-Soviet space have such huge reserves of bog oak survived. For example, in European countries, the discovery of a single specimen of bog oak has been an event for 100 years. And such finds are reported in the media.

For 100 years, many enterprising people in all parts of Russia have been harvesting bog oak. Mostly bog oak was used as a fuel in the composition of other driftwood.

Once, having pulled the trunk to the surface and tried to process it, he was amazed at the beauty and strength of the resulting wood. Admiring, the person asked himself the question: what unknown force turned the familiar oak into a mysterious one, covered on the surface with torn coal pieces, and inside a material that hides the strongest, smoky, lively, unique texture? And he began to look for answers to his questions, working with bog oak and giving him a third life ...

In Russia, furniture sets and souvenirs were created from bog oak, which now take pride of place in museums of fine arts and antique salons all over the world.

Not a single foreign furniture company can offer for everyone to see products that are adequately made of natural bog oak. This is the prerogative of only Russian masters. Since from the beginning of the millennium to the present day, relict oak forests have been completely destroyed all over the world, the stocks of bog oak remained only in Russia.

In contact with

Real or natural bog oak is a unique material created by nature. Its beauty and properties have nothing to do with human skills. On the cut, black, with silver veins or grayish, it inspires craftsmen to create unique things.

, CC BY-SA 3.0

It is oak wood mineralized with metal salts in natural conditions. For many hundreds of years, due to erosion of banks and changes in river channels, coastal oak groves were under water. Under the influence of tannin (gallobinic acid), the wood changes its chemical composition there.

History

The earliest official information on the extraction of bog oak in Russia refer to the 70s. XIX century. The explorer of that time Steel reported, describing the Sura River, that it has long been "littered" with oak trunks.

Later, in 1882, information about the bog oak was published in an article published in the journal "Russian Forestry" No. 12 by the forester Chernitsky, where the author of the article points out accumulations of bog oak in the former Kostroma province.

Guide to Russian Crafts, CC BY-SA 3.0

Gradually, information about the extraction and transportation of valuable material appears more and more in various printed publications.

But the printed evidence does not mean that the oak was not mined before. For a long time, bog oak was developed in an artisanal way: the trunks were found in the water by prospectors and pulled to the surface almost by hand.

Later, an industrial method was developed for the extraction of this elite material, it was used by the joint-stock company "Moscow-Kazan Railway".

Usage

Speaking about bog oak, one cannot but start with a story about. Decoration Gorodets Donets carved and inlaid with bog oak arose in the second half of the 18th century.

Sergey Sokolov, CC BY-SA 3.0

They were made by peasants from the surrounding villages located in the picturesque valley of the forest river Uzola. The inserts, carved from solid black bog oak, stood out spectacularly against the background of the light surface of the bottom.

In Russia, presenting gifts from ebony on especially solemn occasions has become a tradition. Offices, armchairs, bureaus were presented for anniversaries and official appointments.

Guide to Russian Crafts, CC BY-SA 3.0

For the wedding and the day of the angel, the ladies were presented with caskets, caskets and small carved angels made of bog oak. These souvenirs, along with family jewels, have been passed down from generation to generation.

The generals bequeathed the bog oak cabinets to their grandchildren, and the elderly countess could give her great-granddaughter a little angel, which she once inherited from her grandmother, for good luck. Currently, bog oak products are kept either in museums and palaces, or in private collections.

Photo gallery

Useful information

"Bog oak"
(from French "marais" - swamp)

Peculiarities

The characteristic features of bog oak wood are increased hardness, heavy weight, high strength and resistance to decay.

Bog oak lends itself well to mechanical processing.

After 300 years of staining, the wood acquires a delicate fawn hue, and after 1000 years - black.

Blackwood workers

In historical descriptions, you can find the name of bog oak as "ebony" and "iron tree". These names are due to the properties of wood, but we are talking about oak aged under water.

It is characteristic that in Russia there was no concept of "cabinetmaker" - craftsmen working with elite wood were called precisely "blackwoods".

And today, following the centuries-old traditions of the master, they respect the natural uniqueness of each piece of material with which they work, identifying and presenting its best qualities.

The main differences from artificial

Nowadays, there are technologies for artificially creating the effect of bog oak. But there are always ways to spot a fake.

• Bog oak is a fossil material, it is fundamentally different from freshly sawn oak, since for a long time in a humid, airless environment, completely different processes occur in it, associated with the transformation of internal energy.
• Natural bog oak grew at one time in ecologically absolutely healthy, pre-industrial conditions, which makes it possible to make environmentally friendly products from it, which are now in great demand and attention.
• The reserves of natural bog oak are limited and irreplaceable.
• The vast majority of famous bog oak products are of cultural and historical value.
• Currently, mainly 50-100 years old oak wood is being processed, that is, the wood that at the cellular level was fully exposed to technogenic factors.