Wood preserving - Shou Sugi Ban – A Japanese +300 years old technique

  Hi there steemers! @mac-o reporting back.

Trust you will be cheering for your country in this Olympic Games, at least until we have a Blockchain delegation representing all of us here and around the Crypto Nation jeje. 

[World of advice from uncle Mac-o: Olympiads is the time between each Olympic game, don’t get confused with that XD].  

 Moving away just a bit from this Olympic Games hype, I wanted to show you a technique I recently learned and experimented with. I believe the effect you get on the wood, plus the fact you don’t use any chemical product is very good. In my personal opinion it feels more natural and organic. 

This technique was developed in Japan and has been commonly used since 1700s, nevertheless it is not widely known around the globe. Thanks to the work of the Japanese architect Terunobu Fujimori in the early 2000s this technique has become more mainstream.  

Reading an article about his work, I decided to give it a try. No! I didn’t build a house with this technique [for now, muahahahaha], that would be too risky without even taking into account that I have cero house building experience. Heck no, I just used it in some wood BBQ plates that I have. But before going further in my Shou Sugi Ban Do It Yourself or SSBDIY for the acronym lovers out there, let me quickly summarize what are the technique's fundamentals: 

_First, Shou Sugi Ban directly translates into English as “Burnt Cedar Board”. Any Japanese speaker/enthusiast out there that would like to confirm this is more that welcome. This technique is not restricted to cedar, in my case I used pine; you can also use cypress…. Orrrr experiment! But please let me know the outcome, i'm most interested in knowing someone else experience with this.

_Basically you burn the wood as much as you want, nevertheless in the tradition technique you char the wood. Below I’m adding an image that you can easily find just by googling the technique’s name where it shows an example of the same wood burnt in different degrees. 

 _Traditionally you burn the wood with a bonfire, but in my case I just used a gas torch. 

_Once you have burned the wood as much as you wanted, you sweep it with a medium/soft brush removing all the exceeding char. 

_After you finish with the brushing, you “paint” the board with natural oil. In my case I used sunflower oil. And you burn it again with the torch, but this step is only to dry the oil, you will notice that unlike the first burn, the wood burnt colors won’t change much.  

_You brush it one more time in case there are any pieces of chart missing from the first sweep, clean it with a dry cloth and voila, you are done! 

These are two pics of the BBQ wood plates before I applied Shou Sugi Ban  

Close up so you can better see the wood details pre-SSB

 Those cherry tomatoes are from my home garden, delicious! 

And these are the plates once finished:

 The resulting overview 

 

Rear side, the burnt stripes are just amazing.

Hope you guys liked it and feel free to comment or share any piece of advice if you are kinda savvy with this technique.

Bonus Track: 

I might apply SSB with this wood fence I made at home, will keep you posted if I do: