Finished But Not Complete

 

As a wood worker, one will quickly learn that there are many opinions on how to do or not do something. It is hard to discern the truth out of all of those so often one is left to make an informed choice and then hopefully learn from the experience. 

One such subject is whether or not one should finish cedar. Cedar wood in its raw form is naturally rot, moisture and bug resistant which makes it great for an outdoor wood. But left alone, it will over time fade away from the nice reddish tones into a uniform bland gray and eventually almost black in color. It will still be structurally sound but the color will be different. 

There is an option to finish the wood to help preserve the color longer. One can apply a film finish which sits on the surface and essentially creates a protective bubble around the entire object. But with time and use, that finish always fails at some point and then moisture and time will play havoc on the finish causing it to bubble, blister and peel. To fix it, one has to sand back down to bare wood first which depending on the project can be a fairly easy to a monumental task. Getting into all the nooks and crannies of a swinging chair would put it into the "Mission Impossible" category.

In the last few years, I have started playing around with new to me finishes such as natural oils. They don't make a waterproof layer and don't provide a lot of wear protection but they do provide limited color protection and seep within the wood where it will harden from the inside out. In the case of cedar, it would help preserve the wood a bit longer than it's already lengthy timespan and could potentially protect the color changing if reapplied fairly frequently. It also somewhat lightly "stains" the wood giving the wood grain a bit more pop and when working with a wood as beautiful as cedar, the more pop the better.

So after priming the structural beam I plan to hang the swing from, I decided to use my remaining time and put a coat of oil on the whole project. It is the consistency of  jelly and is applied with a white brillo pad to work it down deep into the wood fibers and did indeed pop the color dramatically. I just provided a snap shot of it above but will provide an overall shot when I get it hung. As long as it took me to apply it into all the nooks and crannies, I will probably never apply another coat unless a child of mine needs a timeout of manual labor. I have never used this on outdoor cedar before so it will be interesting to see how well one coat will preserve the color before it inevitably turns a nice gray color for the remainder of the years.