Wood

Burnt tote box

A piece of scrap wood was cut to size on my table saw. I then prepared the router table and the system of fences. It actually worked very well, but it was only set for a shallow, first pass, to route the recess for future processing.

I then clamped the piece down and used another flush trim bit to deepen the groove.

It looked quite nice at that stage, but I decided to round off all the edges with my round-over bit.

It looked rudely before sanding, quite bad and I had second thoughts… But after sanding it got a new shape so I prepared my heat gun for a semi SSB (shou-sugi-ban) burning process. I’m still using the tools I have and I realize that this is not a proper SSB. Anyway, once the wood was burnt, which took a while, I applied the wax straight away to the warm wood. I then used my heat gun to melt down what was left on the surface and repeated these actions a couple of times. This process is very satisfying as you deal with some kind of heat and gorgeous smell and you know that the task won’t take longer than a few minutes to complete. I’m not saying that the smell of lacquer is not nice, but this job is better 🙂

This project is built of a single piece of scrap wood, it didn’t take long from start to finish, there is no joinery involved and it smells so good!

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