How to get bog oak. Oaks under clay. The main differences from artificial

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

AT home environment beautiful bog oak can be obtained, for example, from a bar 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 shoe nails. As well as a plastic lid for a jar, a hammer, a pharmacy solution of 10% ammonia, a thin fishing line, 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, not important for aesthetic use in the future, you need to hammer in a carnation. A small length of 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 carnation, must be brought out of the edges of the opening of the jar. 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 required by technology.

Glue the fishing line on the outside to the surface of the can with stationery tape. Also tape the lid and jar where they meet to prevent even the slightest amount of ammonia fumes.

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

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

If you keep an oak bar in a jar for more than three days, you will get a rather dark color of scorched oak. Because the ammonia vapors were in reaction with tannins for a long time. And the longer this happens, the richer the color. In this case, the depth of wood impregnation 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. Subsequently, bog oak can be used for construction purposes on suburban area. It will look especially beautiful after opening with furniture varnish.

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Bog oak is one of the most valuable types of wood. It is used for the manufacture of art and decorative products. But the extraction and processing of bog oak is a long and costly process. Therefore, the price of the material is high. Dry stained wood traditional ways problematic due to the peculiarities of its structure. We will tell you more about how to dry bog oak in compliance with all technologies.

Bog oak is mined on the banks of rivers. Wood can lie in water for more than a hundred years, and then it is taken out and processed. Products made of stained material have a pleasant dark color and are durable. In terms of density, moraine material is compared with iron, so it is even difficult to cut it. Humidity of freshly mined product can reach 117%. Compared to the natural humidity of 50-65%, the figure is impressive.

Material is obtained in three ways:

1. When bottom - deep works - the most costly and painstaking.
2. When developing peatlands - less laborious.
3. Manufacturing in specialized workshops is the simplest, but multi-stage method.

The weight of wet oak wood is 1500 kg / 1 cu. Therefore, immediately after extraction from the water, the material is cleaned of silt and sand and sawn into small pieces. Otherwise, transportation becomes more difficult.

The tree is afraid of sharp contact with hot air and direct sunlight, so drying is done in a gentle mode. A proven old-fashioned way to dry bog oak is to place small bars in the grain in the fall and leave until spring. Natural drying is also allowed, but it must be carried out in a room with good ventilation and constant indicators of humidity and temperature. It became possible to dry the material in a short time only in the last 10 years, with the advent of new technical means.

For drying bog oak in a short time, the following methods are used:

1. Vacuum chamber.
2. Pulse.
3. Adsorption.
4. Infrared.

But when drying in the chambers, the moraine material becomes discolored and becomes not so dark. Therefore, many criticize methods of unnatural drying. But with natural drying, the areas where the sun hit, also brighten. Chamber drying of bog oak saves time, and if it is carried out in accordance with the technology, then cracks will not appear and the product will not be subject to internal stress.

When chamber drying to a different moisture index, slight changes in geometric shapes are allowed. But if you pre-treat the product with a chemical composition, then the changes will decrease. Details are shown in the table below:

As a chemical treatment, an antiseptic solution of penetrating action is used. In it, the product is soaked for 2-3 hours. And also the shrinkage is affected by the temperature regime in the chamber and the humidity of the air. The maximum allowable temperature is 50 degrees - shrinkage is maximum. Smaller changes are allowed at temperature regime 25 degrees.

Main processing steps

How oak is dried different ways we'll tell you more. The technology is followed step by step and it is unacceptable to skip one of the stages. Otherwise, the wood will crack and become brittle.

Vacuum exposure

Vacuum drying of oak is carried out in special chambers, where under the influence of low atmospheric pressure excess moisture is drawn out of the wood. It takes place in several stages:

1. Bog oak is soaked in an antiseptic solution for 2-3 hours. Sanezh will do.
2. The product is placed in drying chamber, where it is kept at a temperature of 25 degrees and a humidity of 50% from 5 to 10 days. Temperature and humidity must be constant.
3. The oak is placed in a sealed chamber, where, under the influence of a vacuum, it is secondarily treated with an antiseptic solution.
4. Dried at a temperature of 35 degrees and humidity not higher than 25% for 10 days.

The method has advantages:

• Oak wood dries to a predetermined temperature.
• Color change is only 2-7%.
• Complete readiness within 4-5 weeks.

Of the minuses stand out high costs on electricity and the complexity of the process. If you do not keep track of humidity or temperature, then the wood will crack and become unusable.

Pulse Method

The impulse method of drying bog oak is rarely used in Russia due to high costs. But it is considered effective and the material dries evenly.

It is carried out in the following steps:

1. Conductors are connected to the wooden blank on both sides.
2. The second ends of the conductors are connected to a special electrical appliance that will supply current.
3. Under the influence of electrical impulses, the workpiece gradually dries up to the required moisture content.

If you have the skills and knowledge, then you can assemble such a device with your own hands and use it for work.

adsorption method

The adsorption method resembles the old grandfather method and is available to everyone at home. To dry, a small piece of oak is placed in a material that absorbs moisture as much as possible. Craftsmen use special mineral granules. But newsprint will do.

Drying is carried out in the following steps:

1. Small blanks are soaked for 3-4 hours in a container with an antiseptic solution. But you should not use solutions with bleaching effects, otherwise the black color of the valuable breed will disappear.
2. The blank is wrapped in several layers of paper and placed in a well-ventilated and dry place.
3. Each day, the product is unfolded and folded into new newspaper sheets.

Drying is carried out for 1-2 months. The wood will not crack and retain its noble hue.

infrared plates

The infrared light heats the wood evenly and the drying process is gentle. The workpiece does not heat up and no internal deformation is observed. The method is available at enterprises and at home. It is enough to purchase several infrared heating elements and place them on a frame made of timber or metal.

Drying is carried out in the following steps:

1. The workpiece is soaked in an antiseptic solution for 3-4 hours.
2. Placed on a flat surface under infrared heaters.
3. Once an hour, the workpieces should be turned over so that the heat is evenly distributed.

Humidity is checked with a handheld moisture meter. When the product dries out, it is allowed to rest for 3–4 days in a dark and cool place with a humidity of 15–25%. Then use as directed.

Of the advantages of drying under infrared plates stand out:

• Wood does not warp or crack.
• Does not lose its black color.
• Drying occurs evenly over the entire depth and length.
• Energy costs are minimal.

The method has no disadvantages, but because of its novelty, it is little trusted. The video below details one of the available ways to dry hardwoods:

How to properly dry bog oak is the secret of wood carving masters. It was passed down from father to son and carefully preserved. But with the advent of new technologies, it is not difficult to dry stained wood at home. The main thing is to follow the technology and follow our instructions.

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. Black, streaked with silver or greyish when cut, it inspires craftsmen to create unique pieces.

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

Story

The earliest official information about the extraction of bog oak in Russia dates back to the 70s. XIX century. The researcher of that time Stal reported, describing the Sura River, that it had long been “clogged” with oak trunks.

Later, in 1882, information about 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 to accumulations of bog oak in the former Kostroma province.

Gradually, information about the extraction and transportation of valuable material is increasingly appearing in various printed publications.

But printed evidence does not mean that oak has not been mined before. For a long time, bog oak has been 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 for the extraction of this elite material was also developed; it was used by the Moscow-Kazan Railway joint-stock company.

Usage

Speaking of bog oak, one cannot help but start with a story about. decorative design Gorodets donets with carving and inlay from bog oak arose in the second half of the 18th century.

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

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

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, were passed down from generation to generation.

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

Photo gallery

Helpful information

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

Peculiarities

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, wood acquires a delicate pale shade, and after 1000 years - black.

blacksmiths

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

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

And today, following the centuries-old traditions of the craftsmen, they respect the natural originality of each piece of material they work with, revealing 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 distinguish 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 related to the conversion of internal energy.
• Natural bog oak used to grow in ecologically absolutely healthy, pre-industrial conditions, which makes it possible to produce environmentally friendly products from it, which are currently in high demand and attention.
• Stocks of natural bog oak are limited and irreplaceable.
• The vast majority of known products from bog oak are of cultural and historical value.
• At present, mainly 50-100-year-old oak wood is being processed, that is, wood that has been fully exposed to technogenic factors at the cellular level.

Bog wood, bog oak is a unique wood, rare and fabulously expensive. Elite furniture, parquet and even Jewelry, extremely strong, unique and durable. It is valued all over the world and the fashion for it is enduring, like the fashion for gold and diamonds.

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

For many hundreds of years, oak trunks sunk during floods or rafting lie at the bottom of rivers and oxbow lakes. They are partially or completely covered with sand and silt, which means that the wood is largely isolated from oxygen. In such conditions, the tree becomes strong, like a stone. It changes chemical composition, and at the same time it turns out to be processed with such a natural preservative as tannins. Further. Tannins, of which there are plenty in oak wood, enter into a 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 strong, but also amazing in color.

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

My friend on LiveJournal tar_s shared his pictures:

Oaks under clay. Central Russia. The wood is stained, it was torn out of the river in large quantities for construction purposes.
Filmed on the phone. Yes, and in order to take a good picture, you need to shoot from the river, from the boat. It can be seen that the oak is even as a string and a meter in girth. Above the place where it goes into the cliff, four meters of soil - clay and sand. Chernozem layer on top is about 15 cm.
They usually have roots like this:

So I look at them - no more than 300 years maximum. But rather less. Pulling them out is really, really hard. Locals told how trucks dug in when they pulled a log out of the water, one end of which was in the bottom.
Apparently, the river changed its course (and there were several old women around), and simply washed out the place where the oak forest 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 that; in the area all oaks 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 the phone case is 12 cm long.
there was a real ship forest. I don’t see natural dams, trunks stick out evenly along the river, here and there. Rather, as I said, the river washed 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 a whirlpool, they are covered with sand and clay and .. we are waiting for a couple of hundred years. But judging by the amount of it in the rivers, the rivers washed away all the forests, completely. Leaving nothing to posterity. The depth and condition say that this is several hundred years, if more than 500, then the tree will already petrify. I read that in the 19th century there was so much bog wood that it was mined to heat stoves. And this despite the fact that pulling it out is easier to cut down a few 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. About the same and the current forests - 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! This is how many rivers washed away forests? And it was like this - The forests washed away by the wave were washed away into the rivers, and carried down by the stream. There were many trees, they made natural dams, because of which the level of rivers locally rose, sand and clay from the stream filled them up and "cemented". This is confirmed by rocks that are homogeneous in thickness and content in the layer of covered trees. Please let me know if there is anything in your case.

Such a trunk can only grow in a forest, the thickness of 300 years, add 200 (let's say), a total of at least 500 years from birth. There are also oaks over 500 years old. In the European part of Russia, oaks over 500 years old are almost never found. Maximum single copies. Conclusion - 200-300 years ago, some kind of cataclysm washed away a huge number of trees into the water. The question is what could have done this, then flushing the uprooted trees into the rivers. I think those trees that did not end up under clay, water and sand without oxygen, the bacteria processed a maximum of a dozen or two years, completely into dust, so there are no traces in the upper layers on land from the trunks. Only in clay layers.

I supplement with photos 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 aren't these growing now? Haven't grown up yet. It takes hundreds of years for oaks to grow into such giants.

Please note that the trunk at the root is broken off. Those. washing the tree with flood water cannot explain this fact. This tree was broken off by a catastrophic stream.

Once again, the expression "bog oak" came across in the book and I realized that from the context I understand that this is something expensive, a sign of prosperity, but I have absolutely no idea who froze this oak :)
So, I'll start my story.
On the banks of one of the many rivers grew an oak grove. Over time, the river washed away the shore with its course and the trees fell into the water. In the absence of oxygen, the wood was not subject to decay, and under the influence of iron salts and other elements of the periodic table contained in dissolved form in river water, the color of bog oak acquired various shades, from light gray to jet black with a purple tint, depending from the time spent in the river and from the composition of the water in it. The age of some samples of bog oak according to radiocarbon analysis is from 400 to 8000 years or more!

In the Middle Ages in Russia and in a number of European countries, bog oak was highly valued and very popular among the nobility. Various interior elements, furniture and even royal thrones were made from it.

At present, there are no industrial deposits of bog oak left in Europe. Yes, and in Russia the reserves of bog oak are not unlimited, every year due to the growing popularity of this unique material, the extraction of bog oak is actively growing. Bog oak is used not only in "handicraft" woodcarvers, for the manufacture of various souvenirs, but also in large-scale industrial production for the manufacture of parquet and furniture.

For comparison.
Common oak wood

Bog oak

Extraction and processing of natural bog oak

If the harvesting of ordinary wood, whether it be pine, birch or backout, rosewood is a common operating process, polished by people for thousands of years, supported by proven technologies and a variety of mechanisms and equipment, then purposefully harvesting natural bog oak, both in ancient times and now, has been and is being done very rarely and mostly exclusively when performing responsible tasks. Harvesting natural bog oak is a complex, time-consuming process and qualifies as the extraction of a natural resource. Indeed, in order to cut down a tree, you can simply approach it at any time, determine its condition, quality and cut it down. And it can be done by one person without undue effort. And in order to get bog oak, you must first find it at the bottom water body, for which it is necessary to survey significant underwater areas, sometimes in difficult conditions.
Having found a bog oak, it must be prepared for lifting. Then, using serious equipment or mechanisms, you need to raise multi-ton production to the surface, and the weight of bog oak can reach 10 and 20 tons.
Having raised it to the surface, it must be moved to the place of bucking, and only after that it is possible to proceed to its assessment as a material and to the subsequent mandatory processing. After all, it often happens that a bog oak, which looked quite impressive under water and which required considerable effort and expense to lift, was completely disappointing on the shore.
The bog oak raised to the surface must be put into circulation as a matter of urgency, since it is practically reactivated after many years of being in an airless environment and in a short period of time it can all become unusable.
The access to the extracted bog oak at the place of ascent to the land is also very often a serious amount of work. Since, when loading and transporting ordinary wood, due to its significant volumes, work on the construction of reliable access roads is economically justified, then when, for example, a timber truck approaches the place of loading bog oak, sometimes it can be an almost insoluble problem. To the place of rise to the land of each bog oak, do not break through the passage with a bulldozer and do not muck marshy places. Not to mention the fact that employees of environmental authorities up to a centimeter and piece by piece count the damage caused environment in the coastal zone. And then the transportation of the extracted bog oak has to be carried out according to an individual decision in accordance with the parameters of the wood. Moreover, the bog oak logs themselves are saturated with water to the limit and are almost twice as heavy as the same logs of ordinary oak, which, of course, complicates the work. But it is still far from obtaining high-quality bog oak. Ahead is the most difficult issue - storage and high-quality drying of bog oak. Storage and drying of ordinary wood are studied thoroughly, scientific works and treatises on the drying of ordinary wood make up huge technical libraries throughout the world. State and international norms and standards for ordinary wood have been introduced. But the study of the storage and drying of natural bog oak to obtain the maximum yield of quality products is at an early stage. This situation significantly affects the cost, supply and demand of high-quality bog oak. You can listen to many opinions on this matter, but the fact remains that today there is no stable demand for natural bog oak. And this is due to the fact that due to the very high cost of high-quality bog oak, there is no stable supply of high-quality bog oak on the valuable wood market. Many of those who decided to try themselves in the extraction and processing of bog oak as a result of the lack of demand for their already obtained, mostly not best quality material, close the topic and for a penny they sell to buyers what is possible to take away from it, and the rest of the material is put into the furnace. Unfortunately, this is the reality. Over the past 20 years, thousands of enterprising people in the post-Soviet space have tried to establish a business in the extraction and processing of bog oak. Seems like it might be difficult. He drove a tractor to the river, pulled out an oak, took it to a collective farm, and recently to a private sawmill, sawed it, and sold it. But this simplicity is very deceptive. There is a known case when in the 1990s about 700 m3 of natural bog oak was brought ashore and stored during the navigation season. Several wagons were sent to the buyer, some were thrown back into the river in the late autumn, and a significant part went to firewood. And, unfortunately, there were many such cases. Wagons with wet bog oak went abroad, which at the final destination also lost all its consumer properties. Thousands of cubic meters of bog oak went into stoves or are still submerged in oxbow lakes and lakes after summer storage under the scorching sun. Get quality material when re-lifting and processing it will be very difficult.

Fumed oak

Currently, you can often find offers to supply artificially stained bog oak (Fumed oak) in terms of its physical and mechanical properties, which are superior to natural bog oak (Bog Oak). Sellers guarantee impeccable color parameters of lumber, veneer. The price of such bog oak (Fumed oak) is comparable to the price of modified wood MHMD, TMD, PMD. It is assumed that such material completely replaces natural bog oak (Bog Oak), which is very expensive to extract and process. In fact, artificially stained bog oak (Fumed Oak) only remotely resembles natural bog oak, and this despite the fact that artificial staining technologies involve the use of drugs that are sometimes very harmful to humans. In the European Union, a ban on the use of chemically treated wood was introduced. Similar restrictions apply in the US.