Making a reclaimed oak dining bench

I was asked by a friend to make a reclaimed oak dining bench to match a dining table they bought when stationed in Europe. The table was made of reclaimed oak and had a rustic, hand planed (or hand scraped) texture running across the grain.

I sourced the reclaimed oak from an Iowa farm that had salvaged, rough cut oak 2x4’s that were originally from some sort of shipping frame and had been lying around for a couple decades. You can see their original condition at the very beginning of the video.

The first step was to clean them up and get them straight and square. I built a straightening jig and used hand planes, but did use a planer to get them to a consistent thickness.

The video does not show the process of gluing up the top or blanks for the legs. I did not think to film this until I had already done so and created the rustic, hand planed texture on the top.

To get the desired texture to match the existing table, I took an old block plane that I picked up at a garage sale and ground about a 3-4 inch radius on the blade. After repeated sharpening, it worked pretty well. Since this was old, reclaimed oak, the resulting texture using the curved plane, exposed insect trails, and chip out from planing across the grain is quite satisfying and begs to be touched.

Matching the finish was a real challenge as the table obviously had some sort of tinted varnish instead of a typical stain/varnish finish. I ended up carefully staining the oak first, and then using a tinted poly to better match the table and even out the color a bit as the porous grain (early wood) of oak soaks up more stain than the dense grain (late wood).