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5k Year Old Bog Oak Table: Digging up 4k-year-old trees for furniture

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Re: 5k Year Old Bog Oak Table: Digging up 4k-year-old trees for furniture

#71

Post by dylan604 »

quesera wrote: post #38
dylan604 wrote: post #20

When moving day comes around, I'm guessing you have to offer more than just beer & pizza when it comes to moving a 43' table.

And 43' of table with the density of ebony..! From the article: 72 lbs/ft^3. Estimating the table width at 6', and thickness at 2", that would be a total weight of 3096 lbs. Plus a healthy non-zero for the legs and other supports. If you carry the tabletop (legs and trusses removed) with 24 people, 12 on a side, one every 4 feet, that would be 129 lbs each. OSHA would not approve. You could probably find 24 people at…

Does OSHA have any say of something occurring in the UK though?

One of the image captions states 18 people carried a single slab, so there's no way 24 would carry the full table, even without doing the maths.

Re: 5k Year Old Bog Oak Table: Digging up 4k-year-old trees for furniture

#72

Post by dylan604 »

hu3 wrote: post #47
quesera wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And 43' of table with the density of ebony..! From the article: 72 lbs/ft^3. Estimating the table width at 6', and thickness at 2", that would be a total weight of 3096 lbs. Plus a healthy non-zero for the legs and other supports. If you carry the tabletop (legs and trusses removed) with 24 people, 12 on a side, one every 4 feet, that would be 129 lbs each. OSHA would not approve. You could probably find 24 people at…

For metric system folks: 129 lbs is roughly 58.5 kg of mass per person to lift.

Metric system conversion should not be difficult, however, I recently learned it has been made convoluted.

Attempting to find out the per gram price of something bought in a kilogram bundle, I simply divided the kilo price by 1000. This is where it got confusing. I was told there are only 985 grams in a kilo. Me: huh?? It's literally the definition of the word kilogram, 1000 grams.

Fucked up maths: 1kilo = 2.2lbs * 16oz * 28g = ~985g

Further discussion on 1oz = 28g and least significant digit only made matters worse. Apparently, this is the standard on purchasing of items sold in kilograms.

Re: 5k Year Old Bog Oak Table: Digging up 4k-year-old trees for furniture

#73

Post by itronitron »

toomanybeersies wrote: post #6

In New Zealand, there are old swamplands filled with swamp Kauri. Around a year ago, construction workers found a 16 m (52 ft) long log which had been buried underground for 40,000 years [1] They used to dig up $200 million worth of timber a year, mostly exported to China, until the government cracked down on exports. It's illegal to export unfinished native timber, so exporters exploited a loophole by cutting the tr…

So the job market in NZ for chainsaw artists is picking up?

Re: 5k Year Old Bog Oak Table: Digging up 4k-year-old trees for furniture

#74

Post by smoe »

hdjfkkrrn wrote: post #50

Saw a documentary about ultra rich people houses in London. Another similar thing is water logged trees - they pull trees which sat for centuries in Slovakia's lakes. They fill the cracks with metal (bronze). A bonus point it's that the table becomes a "story". Pretty much everything in the house needs to have a "story", which is more important than the actual thing.

I'm far from ultra rich, but I like that many of the items in my apartment have at least little bit of story behind them or their makers and are not just being purely functional or decorative. Not that I feel the need to tell the stories to anyone, but at least to me, this gives the space a lot more soul, than if I just had hired an interior designer filling it with stuff or got complete IKEA sets.

I live a fairly "minimalist" lifestyle (I don't subscribe to the ideas of minimalism, the Swedish "Lagom", "just the right amount", is closer), so I can spend more on fewer items, maintain them and have more time selecting, making or commissioning them.

Re: 5k Year Old Bog Oak Table: Digging up 4k-year-old trees for furniture

#75

Post by shuntress »

tomrod wrote: post #36
weregiraffe wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Then you find wood called "cellulose products" and the cycle starts again. Inventing new words doesn't magically absolve you of crimes, you know.

Actually it does. Consider "bribe" versus "campaign donor." "Execution" versus "murder". Many cases exist. But that is beside the point. Laws have to be specific, and that is the issue. If you can perform a minimal treatment to the object under the law, then it can be transmuted under the law and the spirit of the regulation is sidestepped.

Laws cannot be specific for this exact reason.

Reason, judgement, and consensus must be part of the process.

To ban the export of unprocessed domestic wood, is it preferable to pre-define and include every possible "process" or is it better to have judges who asses whether any given would-be export is "processed"?

Also, lets skip the argument of regulatory capture/neglect by just agreeing that government transparency/accessibility and voter enfranchisement are critically important to maintaining any reasonable consensus-based system.

Re: 5k Year Old Bog Oak Table: Digging up 4k-year-old trees for furniture

#76

Post by novok »

mywittyname wrote: post #63
sillyquiet wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

yeah, spot-on, it's less IKEA and more the cheap assemble-it-yourself knock-offs you find at Target and Wal-Mart and the like that gives that kind of furniture its poor reputation. IKEA furniture I bought a decade or more ago is still in great shape.

Quality IKEA furniture is made of solid fir/pine/spruce and is finished with a resin paint that resists scratching pretty (though, pine is still soft and dents easily). If you put it together using some wood glue, it will hold up for years. IKEA absolutely sells cheap furniture made of laminated MDF, and it's often half the price of the quality stuff. And it's not fair to lambast IKEA for sacrificing quality to hit a…

Half the time it's not even MDF anymore, it's just laminated reinforced cardboard with chunks of MDF here and there for screw points. What I find really sad is how a lot of expensive furniture also uses MDF.

Re: 5k Year Old Bog Oak Table: Digging up 4k-year-old trees for furniture

#77

Post by bradford »

yitchelle wrote: post #46

While the furniture is beautiful, (that cabinet is out of this world), do you really need bog oak to give it that beauty? Can't it be manufactured to the same beauty using wood from today's trees?

> Can't it be manufactured to the same beauty using wood from today's trees?

I work with wood, and I'd like to think the answer is yes. While bog oak does have a special beauty to it (I can't think of another wood that's similar), most wood species have their own special qualities, and I wouldn't say that bog oak is inherently any more beautiful than walnut/cherry or many other varieties.

Bog oak is notable for its rarity and difficulty in handling. This drives up the cost and makes it coveted. But beauty really is in the eye of the beholder.

Re: 5k Year Old Bog Oak Table: Digging up 4k-year-old trees for furniture

#78

Post by brabel »

lostlogin wrote: post #67
sandworm101 wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is also an environmental aspect. Limits on the export of unfinished wood/logs ensures that the wood isn't being sold to become firewood. Firewood is a thing. Something like 8-10% of UK electricity (2017) came from firewood harvested in the US. https://www.pri.org/stories/2018-06-20/uk-s-move-away-coal-m...

The wood dug out of swamps in NZ is far too valuable to be firewood, but wrecking wetland does have a massive negative impact. It’s worth googling images of swamp kauri if woodworking is your thing, the logs are truely massive.

I did just that... and found this interesting article about swamp kauri and how they helped understand what happened last time the Earth's magnetic poles reversed, 42,000 years ago: https://www.nzherald.co.nz/northern-advocate/news/ancient-no...

Re: 5k Year Old Bog Oak Table: Digging up 4k-year-old trees for furniture

#79

Post by tptacek »

tomrod wrote: post #36
weregiraffe wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Then you find wood called "cellulose products" and the cycle starts again. Inventing new words doesn't magically absolve you of crimes, you know.

Actually it does. Consider "bribe" versus "campaign donor." "Execution" versus "murder". Many cases exist. But that is beside the point. Laws have to be specific, and that is the issue. If you can perform a minimal treatment to the object under the law, then it can be transmuted under the law and the spirit of the regulation is sidestepped.

A bribe is a donation made with an overt expectation of quid pro quo.

A murder is an unlawful killing.

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