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The Fenland Black Oak Project
- Oarch 3y agoA 13-meter (42ft) table made from a 5000 year old oak tree that was preserved by bog conditions in England.
- bloqs 3y agoWas not expecting to see Fenland referenced here! Beautiful project.
- n4te 3y agoWhy would I want each paragraph and image to fade in as I scroll down the page?
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- dang 3y ago"Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—e.g. article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage. They're too common to be interesting." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- zdw 3y agoI wonder if any special care was required to cut a subfossilized 5000 year old piece of wood - does it get appreciably harder over time? Or was that not long enough? Also interesting that they had to dry it out and the planks shrank by half. I wonder if they considered having to replace the liquid with something else, such as was done with the Vasa ship which was submerged for a few hundred years.
- darkclouds 3y agoIts always been my understanding that recovered timbers need some sort of fluid replacement. The Mary Rose had 19years of being sprayed with PEG. https://maryrose.org/news/mary-rose-enters-final-phase-of-conservation/ https://maryrose.org/news/mary-rose-enters-final-phase-of-co... For almost three decades since being raised from the Solent, the hull of the Mary Rose – Henry VIII’s 500-year-old flagship – has been continuously sprayed, first with chilled fresh water to remove salt and then with Polyethlene Glycol (PEG), a water soluble wax.
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- stringbean 3y agoThis depends on the individual piece of wood. Bog oak can be incredibly tough as the fossilisation process has started and the minerals from the water deep into the wood. Replacing the water with resins isn’t needed as the original shape won’t be retained (unlike a ship or relic). Care must be taken during the drying process to avoid warping though. I grew up in the Fens and it every few years a farmer would uncover a piece of bog oak and leave it at the edge of a field.
- noduerme 3y agoAwesome project. "table related merchandise" is a funny phrase. I guess art has always needed sponsorship.
- zdw 3y agoI was really looking for "vial of sawdust" or "1cm long splinter" as limited quantity items in their store.
- angiosperm 3y agoThey could sell pieces of True Cross cut from scraps of it. The story of how it got transported from Judea to England and buried there is the stuff of legends.
- DonHopkins 3y agoThey should license it to MMORPG fantasy games for decorating castles.
- jihadjihad 3y agoWow, what an awesome project. The pictures at the end where the table is in the cathedral could almost be straight out of Lord of the Rings...it looks like something you'd see in Minas Tirith.
- pieperz 3y agoI just got in to milling trees in the last month, went from a 20" to mill up an old oak that fell in my back yard to a 36" 661. All I can say is the satisfaction of seeing what is in a tree has been some of the most fun I've ever had in 100+ degree weather. If you made it 75 degrees and 5000 years old I may never stop hunting.