You wouldn’t know it though from my latest crazy dangerous invention.
With the success of my last rustic farmhouse style furniture build, I’ve begun another although somewhat more ambitious and complicated. This time though, rather than using fence pickets and 2x4s I actually bought some nice wood (which is an oxymoron) from the Homo Depot. The problem is it looks too new and therefore needed to be distressed to look old to get the look I was going for.
There’s about a million videos on YouTube on how to distress wood, each with different techniques. Some just a combination of stains and paints with others involving a more hardcore approach which is a lot more authentic looking and since hardcore and danger are my middle name, this is the route I took. I spent five hours in 110+ degree heat today distressing my main pieces (legs and cross-members) and ended up with something I am good with
I started out with a 4” holesaw used by hand down the length of each board to rough up and dig into the grain. The two-sided legs are 6 foot tall. I then beat everything with a hammer, slammed it with a heavy rusty old chain and poked about 10,000 holes with a punch and screwdriver. I still didn’t have quite the rough sawn look I wanted and wondered what else I could use to give it for that came out of an old sawmill look.
Maybe it was the heat or maybe just the lack of good common sense? I am normally very safety conscious when using my power tools but after rigging my device together, with visions of gutting myself and watching my intestines splooge out of my body, I smiled at myself for my inventiveness.
Taking a buffer/sander thing and removing the rubber pad, I affixed a very old and dead but still damn sharp 10” tablesaw blade. To my credit, I did point the leading edge of the teeth so they rotated in a backward direction.
May I present the tool I’ve called “Death Wish”!
![[Image: attachment.php?aid=2080]](https://rogue-nation.com/mybb/attachment.php?aid=2080)
![[Image: attachment.php?aid=2081]](https://rogue-nation.com/mybb/attachment.php?aid=2081)
I imagined if this was battery powered, it would be handy in a zombie apocalypse. I imagined myself as Ash in the Evil Dead but then came back to reality.
Again to my credit, I didn’t rev the thing up to full speed and only put it to wood gently after releasing the trigger on the spin down and it was still scary AF but kind of fun anyway and gave me enough of the crosshatch look I wanted. In a few places I cut it a little deeper than in the below pic.
![[Image: attachment.php?aid=2079]](https://rogue-nation.com/mybb/attachment.php?aid=2079)
On the left is the after and on the right is the virgin wood. (please, no jokes about virgin wood!) Combined with the other wood I am using in this project which is already rough cut, I think this is going to look great but the whole process was a lot of hot long hard work. (what's wrong with me tonight?)
When I finished, I dismantled my implement of mass destruction, thanked my lucky stars I wasn’t dead or on the way to the hospital and told myself never to do stupid shit like this again! My arms are going to be sore tomorrow.
With the success of my last rustic farmhouse style furniture build, I’ve begun another although somewhat more ambitious and complicated. This time though, rather than using fence pickets and 2x4s I actually bought some nice wood (which is an oxymoron) from the Homo Depot. The problem is it looks too new and therefore needed to be distressed to look old to get the look I was going for.
There’s about a million videos on YouTube on how to distress wood, each with different techniques. Some just a combination of stains and paints with others involving a more hardcore approach which is a lot more authentic looking and since hardcore and danger are my middle name, this is the route I took. I spent five hours in 110+ degree heat today distressing my main pieces (legs and cross-members) and ended up with something I am good with
I started out with a 4” holesaw used by hand down the length of each board to rough up and dig into the grain. The two-sided legs are 6 foot tall. I then beat everything with a hammer, slammed it with a heavy rusty old chain and poked about 10,000 holes with a punch and screwdriver. I still didn’t have quite the rough sawn look I wanted and wondered what else I could use to give it for that came out of an old sawmill look.
Maybe it was the heat or maybe just the lack of good common sense? I am normally very safety conscious when using my power tools but after rigging my device together, with visions of gutting myself and watching my intestines splooge out of my body, I smiled at myself for my inventiveness.
Taking a buffer/sander thing and removing the rubber pad, I affixed a very old and dead but still damn sharp 10” tablesaw blade. To my credit, I did point the leading edge of the teeth so they rotated in a backward direction.
May I present the tool I’ve called “Death Wish”!
I imagined if this was battery powered, it would be handy in a zombie apocalypse. I imagined myself as Ash in the Evil Dead but then came back to reality.
Again to my credit, I didn’t rev the thing up to full speed and only put it to wood gently after releasing the trigger on the spin down and it was still scary AF but kind of fun anyway and gave me enough of the crosshatch look I wanted. In a few places I cut it a little deeper than in the below pic.
On the left is the after and on the right is the virgin wood. (please, no jokes about virgin wood!) Combined with the other wood I am using in this project which is already rough cut, I think this is going to look great but the whole process was a lot of hot long hard work. (what's wrong with me tonight?)
When I finished, I dismantled my implement of mass destruction, thanked my lucky stars I wasn’t dead or on the way to the hospital and told myself never to do stupid shit like this again! My arms are going to be sore tomorrow.
Knowledge is knowing that a tomato is a fruit. Wisdom is not putting it in a fruit salad.
