Finish and Sealing Before Deck Raising. Timber Frame Tutorial Series (14x8 Deck Episode 6)

Okay, this is Dan from Artistic Timber Works and we're at the last stage of actually our deck product project that we have. We have a 16 by 20 deck and an 8 by 14 deck and these are all the pieces, knee braces that we need to get stained and finished. Now we've been using this product Woodrich brand timber oil for the last couple of years and honestly we put it through the tests. Almost every building that we have here in our mill is used with this timber oil and we've done multiple projects, siding, decking, which we'll show you later on, but it applies perfectly easy. As it says, no drip. I guarantee when you're done, these beams will look perfect. Now I've already got my gun set up. You could use a roller, a rag, or whatever. We find it easy to actually just spray this on and we're going to actually spray the two sides, do the whole package. We're going to flip it. We're going to spray the other two sides and we're going to let the oil sink in for about an hour or so. It's cold out today, so the longer you leave it the better and then we'll show you how we finish it for the final step. Don't worry too much about the inconsistency and or the drips. Just let the oil sit in there and soak in and we'll show you how that will disappear as we finish. So you can see how fast you actually can apply this product and since we're using white oak, I keep emphasizing that this is a very dense wood. I do not mind the oil sitting in here. It'll give it a chance to soak into the hardwood and literally this is only going to take us about an hour to get prepped and we'll show you after it's sprayed. Okay, we've got the three sides already sprayed. Jason and I just rolled them. I'm going to put the coat on the sides that we couldn't get to, but I just wanted you to see. Not to worry, you see the stain is actually soaking into the wood. Now don't worry about the discoloration. You'll see when we finish it that it's all going to blend out smooth. I mean, you see that? Good stuff. Okay, so all the beams have actually been stained and they've probably been stained for maybe a half an hour and while they're still wet, you see Jason now comes back with a rag and goes over each individual beam. So he's actually wiping the oils into the grains and he's actually smoothing out any of those little runs that I showed you from the beginning and you can see how a beam will come out and this was the beam that we used in the demonstration for the dovetails. So he needs to wipe all of them. We're going to check everything. We'll show you at the end. So right now all our beams are sealed with the wax on the bottom. We're sealed from the side and we like to do this early. Let's say before we put our structures up for several different reasons and one of the reasons is actually the weather and we're only two guys timber framing. So some of our buildings are going to sit outside in the rain, so we actually like to get them sealed. It also puts the color of the building that we're going to use and we don't need to finish them later. Maybe lightly, lightly touch up. Another good example of why we do this is that all four sides of our beams are going to be sealed and what we're trying to do is to slow the drying process down. That's why we use the wax. We use this sealer and the why we actually tried this product is specifically made for green wood and that's what we use for this particular product. They have several different product lines, different colors. All right, it's only been about 15 minutes and Jay's just about finished giving the final wipe down on all the beams. But look how smooth the grain is out here. We use this product. You can see right here our little saw marks which we like to leave in there so it looks like it's come from a rough cut mill. Now right now the product itself looks a little bit shiny because it's wet. In about a day or two it's actually going to feel dry. It's not going to feel like a normal oil product that you're used to. It's perfect for decks. It's perfect for outside wood. It doesn't beat up. It's not slippery. We'll show you some stuff that we did with some five quarter by six white oak. We used a custom color but our package is ready to be taken apart tomorrow, put on our trailer and stored because unfortunately we're going to get some rain and we need to get our wood inside. And I forgot to mention that you see the size of all these beams and everything that we did here. We used less than three gallons of the Woodrich and this particular color is the signature brown. Okay, while we were cutting all of our beams, actually all of the wood to the outside, we waste nothing here at Artistic Timber Works. And what we got is we ended up with 54 six by five quarter white oak, which we're going to make into decking material and probably 20 or 30 three quarter inch pieces that could be used for various other projects. Now we have this thing set up on our dolly and we use the stickers here because we're going to air dry it right here. And we're going to use our package for the time being, all stacked on top of this, which is going to compress this wood down and keep it straight while it's drying. Moving down and because we have a fresh coat of oil on there, they slip pretty easy, easier to move around at this side. Okay, well it's Friday afternoon and as you can see, we've got all our beams loaded. And because we actually cut all the trees from our own private sustainable forest, we like to use everything that we can. So outside of getting all these beams, we also got all of this deck wood that we're going to use. And then after each project, we clean the yard and we actually salvage anything. So these posts or all the cutoffs will actually turn into pegs or cut down into another project we might have. Hey, and just so that you don't think this is just the facade on our log trailer, this is everything that you saw out on our tables, ready for delivery and installation. As you can see, we're ready, cleaned up for the next project. Not only were we able to salvage all that extra deck material, we were able to get all this perfect white oak that we actually got it set up that we cut our pegs with. Since we do everything or make every piece here at Artistic Timber Works, at some point these will become pegs that we put in the building. These pegs will then be thrown into our solar kiln and we don't even waste the cutoffs. All the cutoff material that we can't figure out what to do with, we burn it and it actually helps dry our wood since we have a heat exchanger in there. So at the end of the job, that's our waste material. We were able to salvage and use everything that we cut for this project.