EASY way to Age Wood - Make New Wood Look Old
Jan 5, 2016
I do alot of work with pallet wood. Sometimes I have to use newer wood to and it just does not look right mixing the two. I've searched for an easy method to make new wood look old and I finally found something that works beautifully. The mixture is 0000 Steel Wool and Vinegar. The vinegar type does not really matter. It only takes about 2 weeks for the steel wool to dissolve completely but mine had been aging for almost a year simply because I started it and forgot about it. Just brush it on the wood and watch the aging process happen! This method works better on dry porous wood than it does on freshly milled pine with mill glaze. Try sanding the wood with a low grit sand paper to rough it up before trying it on new wood.
Welcome back tightwads. Today we're looking at a method that I've heard of that tends to age wood
or make it look more aged and we're going to try it out and see if it works. A lot of people are
into the pallet craze right now including me and these are some of the boards that hold the pallets
together so they're usually two by fours and they hold the pallets together and what I've done is
I've cut the pallet apart so you can see the little nails in here but to make it nice and
flush I've taken my table saw and I've ripped a nice clean edge on them but the problem with that
is that the nice clean edge now looks new as well so it's newer looking than the rest of the pallet
board. So one concept I've read about a lot and never actually gotten into using is vinegar and
steel wool. So what you do is you take a mason jar you put vinegar in here and then you buy
zero zero zero zero steel wool break it into pieces and put it inside the vinegar
and the steel wool disintegrates and over time this has been here probably
a year now it turns dark brown and the principle behind this is a chemical reaction
that reacts with the tannins in the wood and it's supposed to age the wood and make it look darker
so what we're going to do is I'm going to take a old cheap brush just a nylon bristle brush
I'm going to brush some of this solution on these boards and then we will check back
in a few hours to see if there's a color change. So right now they look pretty new one of them
was a little bit gray I'm just going to brush brush it on no real technique here
just brush it onto the edges I'm not going well let's go ahead and do both sides
I'm going to do the other side too I'm not worried about my shop bench getting dirty because I'm
about to put a new top on it anyway so if the little gets on here and it ages my shop bench
a little bit makes it a little grayer it's not a big deal you can see it's pretty messy
but I'm liberally applying this mixture to my boards the one farthest from you will keep the
same order for the after shots looks a lot newer than the one closer to you it's already looking
like it's starting to turn so it's going to be interesting to see how it looks in a couple hours
it doesn't turn because of the darkness of this initially it does look that way but it's really a
combination of the of the steel wool and the vinegar making a chemical reaction with the wood
so we'll leave it and we'll come back in about an hour or two and see what it looks like and
then we'll also get a shot after after 24 hours so I'm going to seal this back up so I can use
it again as you can see it doesn't take much of the solution if this works I'll be using a lot
more of it so we'll see wow it's already changing a lot it's already really darkening up on both
sides so I think this is going to do exactly what I want it to do and make my pallet wood boards
look older so I can actually use this wood to frame some pallet furniture and still use the
thin pallet boards as the top surface of them but I did want to get this where it didn't look so nice
and clean on the edges all right so it's been about an hour maybe an hour and a half and I came
back down and the wood is really grayed which is exactly what I wanted you can actually see where
it dripped down this side and actually made this side look a little darker as well so I'll probably
go back and coat the whole thing this side turned gray as well that side's just dirty from being a
here's the second one that was farther away from the camera this one was a little bit lighter than
before so you can tell they match pretty good now both sides match like I said I'll probably go back
and put some on this side to make it look even more aged but I'm very happy with the way it
turned out I went ahead and coated another board all the way around so you can see it is still a
and it's pretty gray has some good earth tones in it a little bit of brown showing through so it
looks like it's reacting pretty well with this wood the difference is if you purchase
this is probably oak it's heat treated and it may be pine but it's probably oak because since it's
the main support beam it's a little bit harder what you buy at Lowe's and Home Depot is normally
pine just in their stockwood and if you ever look at it in the light it has a sheen to it
that's called mill glaze and mill glaze prevents this from really getting down into the pores of
the wood so you don't have as good of a result with new wood and pine with the mill glaze on it
if you do the cross cut on the end it does get a little bit darker but from what I've read the
tannins in oak and other woods or the fact that oak and other woods have more tannins than pine
make it react a lot better with your harder woods so it does work on what I suspect is oak
works okay on pine but not great but on pallet wood it should work pretty well because it's
all really dry and porous so give it a shot let me know what you think as always thanks for
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