@FreeFlyer
Damn, that is one beautiful deck.
And your choice of finish, boiled linseed oil, diluted with mineral spirits, with paraffin dissolved in the last coat, that is so old school. Love it. My father, still alive, is a retired house painter, and recommended that exact same formula for sealing wood when I bought a house. You do the boiled linseed oil & mineral spirits coating several times with dry wood. Then doing the last application with paraffin in the mix, is excellent. You could do the same technique to preserve deadwood in a bonsai tree. Though I would probably skip the paraffin for the bonsai tree, but linseed oil is an excellent wood preservative.
I'd love to see it in person sometime. I keep threatening Carol to drop in for dinner, maybe when I finally do, we'll schedule with you and Carol and I will come over to see this deck in person, it is sweet. (I have family in Saint Louis, that before Covid, I visited often).
could you elaborate on that a lil, by chance?? I'm curious about:
- post burning-and-brushing of the piece, do I even need to 'cut' the linseed oil w/ mineral spirits? (also, do I need more than linseed+mineral spirits? Have appropriate oil-brushes already)
- "Boiled linseed oil"...I'm woefully unfamiliar-- if I'm unable to get my hands on it, are there good alternatives?
- You say "would probably skip the paraffin", I'm presuming because you wouldn't want wax-by-roots? If that's so, why allow the linseed oil? ((also, to be clear, are you talking whole-box coatings or just the exterior?)
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So I'm fighting-through a late "summer intervention" phase in my yard now and had a wooden box that, upon being emptied, wasn't in too-bad shape (had to pull the tree earlier-than-expected due to surprise deadwood-fungi attack) so I:
- hosed it 'clean',
- spent 15min with the torch, getting every lil area (
not charring-hard, merely
'hitting the surface', I don't know[or really care] re nomenclature, ie if it's "still shou sugggi banez if I don't go full-char", but it certainly still protects VERY well as I do even-gentler burnishings of my Bougies' deadwood and it's far-superior to L.Sulfur for preservation, so am confident these 'gentler burnings' are still very very effective!)
- spent maybe 5min, wearing rubber-gloves & brandishing a Brillo, w/ the hose going, to rub-it-back (removing the char that'd otherwise be getting on your hands when you went to move/touch the box, I think that's what I really like about these "halfway-to-shou sugi ban" burnishings, the types I'd always done on bonsai-deadwood, which is that the post-burnishing isn't this undertaking of sanding-back so much, don't get me wrong I've got some BC-trunks that I did full-char & sand-back-fully and the color...wow it's just beautiful but it takes longer, doing my box this way was simple & I expect it'll let me get 2, not 1, more use out of this box
Gotta love being lucky enough to have an industrial-strength fan in my backyard 'shop' whenever I need it ;D
SO.....I'd always called this 'burnishing' for years it's replaced l.sulfur for me for deadwood-preservation, only heard 'shou sugi ban' in August & learned of the 'heavy char, or heavy-char + a brush-back' approach.....don't get me wrong, I can see why the full-on burnishing ('shou s.b.') would be far more preserving but I've got a w.pall-styled watering philosophy, here in semi-tropic/super-humid 9a FL, the heavy irrigation & weak nature of bougie-deadwood has made this a pretty critical thing for me, I've already been messing-around on...less-than-stellar...specimen of mine to see how hard I can burnish bonsai-deadwood(ie doing this w/o heating deadwood so much the radiant-heat damages living-tissue, or "cutting the line" when trying to treat the edge of a deadwood area and not hit the living-tissue aside it) to get a better feel for the limits for a handful of species (and'll report back for sure) but this is truly the coolest preservation method I've ever found (and appears to be among the best/most-optimal, to boot...and it's currently trendy, which I don't see going away anytime soon, so that's obvi a mixed-bag) Wish I'd known of it years ago I'd have done so much with it I mean
most things with it, including decking/home stuff I don't just mean bonsai&arts, anyways thanks again
@Jzack605 because at least I get to start now, will be transplanting one of my favorite Bougies into it today or tomorrow & expect it to look great but am already looking at my grow-out 'box'/bed (2x12" lumber on 4x4 corners, raised 2" above-earth with a mulch-wall blocking that 'passage-out-of-box', good for quick&fast growth on many tropicals) and thinking
I need to burnish that whole thing in fact my next to-do is finding out what I need for 'next step up' torching, I've got a butane-loadable hand-unit (not handheld/pipe-type, in-between that and a handheld propane torch) as well as the standard handheld benzomatic propane tank (saw a youtube this afternoon where a very talented&respected artist used one of these to burnish the deadwood-top of a BC's flared buttressing/nebari, like when just the top-portion of a surface root is deadwood, I was cringing at the though to the radiant-heat going to the bottom of that root & hurting living tissue....am now so eager to 'find the limits' of how far(surface/distance wise) and how deep/long you can char bonsai deadwood w/o hurting living tissue, I'd be holding sooo much more nice deadwood features today if I'd been able to properly intervene earlier, once fungi gets-hold to a certain point a piece is fully-compromised even if it won't naturally fall for years it's still not 'save-able' like something you can treat-when-fresh (I've already got a branch/'jin' that I burnished into its branch-collar (skinned its cambium first, was instead-of simply prune-removal of this branch)) We'll see, I'll certainly be reporting-back as I've been doing an ambitious amount of testing in fact it, and putting my twin-trunk bougie in ^that pot, are my fri night
GG torch 1st, gah it's just so fun, soothing even, to paint w/ fire!!!
. I used Cedar 2x6's for the Shou Sugi Ban deck surface, and holy hell was it a process. It should out live the house though 
. There's no way i'd do this for temporary boxes, if I didn't already have the scraps. 
