Sugi Nb5

[Cecile Lilien]

TerraMais Faux Sugi Ban is an elegant solution for the shou sugi ban charred wood look without the flaking or rubbing off on clothing. No fire is used in the making of Faux Sugi Ban. We texture it to enhance the grain then use a finishing process to give it the shou sugi ban aesthetic of Gendai, meaning burned and brushed once.

At my company, we've been doing shou sugi ban floors for about three years, and we only do them in a safe environment on flooring that isn't actually installed. I've learned a lot since our first attempt at this technique, and I'm sharing what I've learned here in hopes that my fellow professionals will have a better understanding of what an undertaking a proper shou sugi ban hardwood floor is and the safety requirements.

I first heard of the term "shou sugi ban" probably 25 years ago when I was studying Japanese woodworking. Although I'd learned the wood flooring trade, at that point I was still a hobby woodworker, and my mom had bought me a hardbound copy of "The Soul of a Tree" by legendary Japanese woodworker George Nakashima.

What we call shou sugi ban goes back hundreds of years in Japan and is more correctly known as "yakisugi," or the traditional art of burning Cryptomeria japonica, which is colloquially called cedar but is actually a species of cypress native to Japan. Historically in Japan the process of charring the wood was done for exteriors because it destroys the lignin and cellulose, leaving behind nothing that is attractive to insects, mold or mildew. This is why there are still Japanese temples standing from the 13th and 14th century (or even older) in good condition (see the oldest known standing example, from the 8th century, in the sidebar on this page). Although not commonly done in Japan today, the process is seeing a resurgence in the West.

My first attempts at burning wood flooring happened when I began playing with charring the edges of pieces of inlays just to make them look old. To do that, we heated mason sand with a torch and burned the edges of the wood by sticking them in the sand. We wanted to extrapolate that to some larger pieces, but they wouldn't fit in our container.

Next I got a larger burner with a 20-pound cylinder, but I couldn't maintain the gas flow because my tank was icing over from evaporative cooling. I'd have to shut it down and wait to thaw it out before I could use it again. I probably went through three or four ditch burners until a roofer I know said that I needed the one he has, and he told me where to get it. That burner is what they use for doing seams on bituminous membranes for flat roofs; it's 400,000 BTU with a 100-pound tank and 100 feet of hose. It can throw a 5-foot blue flame!

Once I was at that point, I had to figure out how not to heat my feet up or burn my pants, so I ended up getting firefighter boots and Nomex firefighter pants so I could focus on what I was burning and not whether or not I was burning. With regular steel-toed leather boots you'll find yourself running outside pouring cold water on your feet.

The process of actually burning the wood is a lot like airbrushing or using a spray gun, and people quickly realize it isn't as easy as it looks. You have to feather one pass into the next and pay attention to what the torch is doing, because otherwise you'll end up with lines of light and dark with no continuity or uniformity. The height at which you hold the torch is critical; you need to hold it three or four feet high so you don't get a concentrated burn right in the center. That gives you the ability to overlap your passes in a way that blends your pattern.

You can't just pass uniformly at the same speed over each board. Grain that is closer together roasts faster than wider, more diffuse grain. End grain darkens much faster, but knots don't burn as fast as the material around them. So the actual burning process is something you're very much doing by eye. I'm usually burning the flooring to match a control sample chosen by the customer. If I go over it pretty quickly I can get a nice, rich chestnut color, and then of course the options go darker from there.

On these jobs, I've racked out all my flooring to roast it. The flooring will be picked back up and reshuffled when it's actually installed in someone's house. This helps blend in darker and lighter areas that naturally happen in the flooring. One thing I think would be very daunting about doing this on an actual job site (besides the obvious safety concerns) would be getting enough uniformity that you don't have clusters of light and dark burn.

When I'm roasting the floor I'm going down the rows and doing an area about as wide as what I could bite off when I'm staining a floor, so maybe 2 to 3 feet wide. It takes me less than a minute to roast a 2-by-6-foot area, and then someone is coming behind me immediately with a big commercial backpack sprayer to extinguish what I've just done. The sprayer we use can probably pump out a gallon or two per minute. You want that person coming behind you as quickly as possible to put out the fire and minimize the cupping and warping effects of the heat on the wood, but not so quickly that you risk getting overspray on the area you haven't burned, which creates a terrible stippling effect.

I think most guys would be taken aback by how much water we use. They think you just can't put that amount of water on wood, but we typically let the wood dry for 24 to 36 hours, and in our experience we've ended up with product that is stable and well-behaved. We use a moisture meter on the wood to check moisture content before and after the burning/spraying.

Because we are wire-brushing these floors, I find the species that work best are ones like oak and pine that develop a lot of texture between the springwood and summerwood. The process works on woods like maple and cherry, but they won't result in the same contrast in texture.

Once the flooring is wire-brushed, at that point the floor has a nice roasted look, and we can go from there to many interesting looks we've developed by using natural oils; you don't have to be committed to monochromatic looks or just shades of burn. You can take that charred look and shift it into some interesting grays and pastels and other colors. We'll often use a Rubio precolor or a water-based pigment system before we use colored oils on the floor. The process opens up a wide array of specialty finishes and looks that most pros wouldn't have the ability to do.

Here my friend Jeff Rose of Newport, Ky.-based Mansion Hill Custom Floors is working on a floor we created together (pictured above). Note that he isn't using my usual firefighter gear and had to go outside on a regular basis to cool off his feet and legs. 'To get that nice even roast with some darker undertones in the softer grains, it's definitely an art form,'' Jeff said after the project was done.

One of the most famous examples of shou sugi ban is at the pagoda of the Buddhist temple Horyu-ji in Ikaruga, Japan. The temple is one of the world's oldest existing wood structures and has a shou sugi ban wood exterior believed to date to 711 A.D.

Of course we found this out the hard way. When we were first learning, we had a floor laid out in the warehouse, and the guys had done a pretty good job of cleaning up, but there was some dust underneath the flooring in the corner. Well, with the force of the air movement from that flame, the dust immediately ignited, and it created a 3- or 4-foot-diameter fireball. Fortunately no one was injured, but if someone had been standing in that corner I could imagine them getting flash burns. In our warehouse now we have commercial fire extinguishers every 20 feet down the wall.

Besides fire, my biggest concern with people attempting these floors is: How are you evacuating the potential carbon monoxide from incomplete combustion? When we do these floors, we have a huge fan probably 6 feet in diameter that came out of an airplane hanger where they would spray airplanes. It's strong enough that you could probably put it on the back of a boat and go through the bayou. We put that in one door on one end and another on the other end, and we're probably dumping every bit of air in that building a couple times a minute.

Shou Sugi Ban and Encaustic Painting are a perfect match, they are both are born out of fire. Shou Sugi Ban, also known as Yakisugi, is a traditional Japanese art of preserving and finishing wood using fire.

A Shou Sugi Ban finish lasts for hundreds of years, making the wood water and bug resistant. In Japan, they take cedar (cypress) and burn the surface of the wood then they brush off the ash and soot and wash it with water. They let it dry and apply oil to the surface and apply heat again to set the oil. This final step of adding oil is something that I do not do since it can soften the wax and leach into the surface of our paintings.

Different degrees of burns will give different results. Burn the surface quite a lot to create an alligator texture. Burn the surface to a lesser degree to enhance the grain of the wood. In my process, I have decided I would like to enhance the grain and not create a textured surface. As an artist, you can experiment and decide the amount of burn you want to do to create the texture that best suits your work.

I was first introduced to Shou Sugi Ban by another West Coast Canadian Artist, Lynn Harnish. A few years ago, Lynn did a series that began with a Shou Sugi Ban finish to the full surface of her wood cradle and then she applied encaustic medium to part of the surface. The result was a series of very beautiful and interesting paintings.

Over the past few years, I have created a few videos for my IGTV page demonstrating this technique. A number of my followers have tried this technique and you will now see this finish on works by many artists around the world.

I burn the edges of the panel and then use a wire brush to remove the ash and soot, revealing the wood grain. Always brush in the direction of the wood grain with your wire brush. If you want to create texture, you may want to use a soft brush at this point. Here is a short video showing you the process of brushing the wood cradle.

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