Making beech look old--follow-up
Frank D. in Montreal
>Hi everyone,
After the discussion we had below on ageing beech I decided to do a few tests. I suggested using potassium bichromate, and Bill pointed out how toxic it was. So I thought I'd try it myself since I have some, and I wanted to see how it would turn out. I admit the results were not as good as I expected, the beech did look slightly aged but nothing like an old plane. Then I had another idea, which was to use natural walnut stain (not just any old stain with a walnut color but the stain made out of walnuts). The results were much better. I had an old beech plane that I had cut up to make some hand tools, so the results should be more or less representative (however, on the beech I previously saw that was sized with potassium bichromate the results were darker than what I obtained today, so it also depends on the particular wood that the plane is made out of). Here are the 3 pics. The first is a view of the wood sample with a plane on each side (one thing I noticed is that the color of old planes varies from dark brown to light orange brown). The wood is sized with potassium bichromate only (top left), sized with potassium bichromate and walnut stain on top of it (top right). The natural beech is at the bottom of the wood sample in the pic. BTW, I think the top right has the closest color to my other old planes, but as I'll say in the next pic it might not be the best choice.
