Shou Sugi Ban box experiment - softwood

So I was intrigued by the amount of Shou Sugi Ban finish work being done here and decided to take a stab at it to learn a bit. I figured I’d just knock together a box using scrap and burn it. Well, what I had was some softwood planks from another utility project. I resawed them and mitered together a quick box because, again, this was supposed to be an experiment…not a project. 

Well, the ‘project mode’ got the better of me and I started doing some detail work with it. Sloping the edges of the lid, creating a floating base, creating a slight floating lid design and scrapping together a Japanese inspired handle on top. As it was coming together, I was thinking about what the end product might look like, and it struck me that the dark burned exterior reminded me of looking at weathered wood before the sun comes up. Now I’m not an artsy kind of guy, but Japanese woodwork often has themes, or tendencies, towards mimicking nature. I thought I might take advantage of that and have the exterior of the box look something like pre-dawn, with small pools of water where I backfilled with epoxy, and the interior look like the bright sunlight first thing in the morning. 

Since I did this as a two-piece box, not a one piece cut in half, when I put the torch to it it caused some really interesting changes that I wasn’t anticipating. The first was how much of the wood mass was lost. Especially in the softer annular ring sections. This created a scallop effect that I wasn’t expecting, but it is actually very pleasing when you put your hands on it. The other, less pleasing, was that I lost mass in the corners… made worse because this was thin resawn material. It caused quite a bit of wood movement and degradation. I didn’t go anywhere near full alligator with the torch, rather just a nice solid black burn across everything, but I still saw quite a bit of mass lost. I’m assuming this is due mostly to the soft nature of the wood. 

In fact, it caused so much movement where the lid meets the body that I actually went back and recessed that line all the way around to try to give it a more uniform appearance, then, keeping with the sunrise aesthetic. I put some sunflower milk paint along the edge to brighten it up. Kind of like the break of dawn.

It’s by no means show-quality, but as a test piece I’m happy with what I learned!