The Build That: Shou Sugi Ban Finish Review

I started off with a simple finish, which is as close to just like a natural finish as you're going to get with the Shou Sugi Ban. The detailing in there is amazing and it just gives the wood such a warm rich feel.

Next up was the blue stain. I said before that the blue is a stain, not a dye, so it behaves a little bit differently than when we get to the purple. See how like when I wiped it away, we actually even got some of the natural wood color back? But the blue gets that extra depth in there just by giving away a little bit of that wood color.

Then we have the sun bleached one. People always love this one. It's a white Shou Sugi Ban, and when I took it down with the steel wool, you can still see a little bit of wood through there. It gives it that just nice depth of color.

The metallic red is actually called "Unicorn Spit", and that's the name of this line, Artistic Vocations. And that gives it another dimension as well. If you can see the shine kind of come through there, it's got a little bit of metallic sheen to it.

Finally, we have Poiple, which is the dye. The dye is going to give it just kind of a little bit more of a flat look but still give it like a rich detailing. Guys, and then there's just one more shot of them all together just to give you an idea of what they all look like next to each other.

To finish off this build, I'd like to take a second just to thank all my patrons down here who are the ones that make the magic happen. The magic would not happen without them. I would also like to welcome a couple new patrons to the fray. I'm looking at you Derek Coates Dean and Dean Duplantis if that is your real name, and Gabby Fernandez welcome friends.

As always, a special shout out goes out to Nick the Greek, cheers Steven Mann, cheers and Easy-E Eric Weiss, brother. All right guys, that's all I got. If you have any questions, leave me the comments down below. If you like this video hit that like button. If you haven't subscribed yet, hit the subscribe button. And until next time, I gotta get to work. I really do. I have a thing that I gotta build.

Don't be worried if anybody tells you to kiss their converse, tell them to talk to me now. Tell them to talk to me.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enwhat's up guys i'm Nick and this is Build DAD Build  a place where we believe in going back to the basics  basic training basic units of measurement basic instinct  all right guys this is going to be a Shou Sugi Ban 101 tutorial you know i put  out several videos on this technique i still get some some really kind of basic  questions a lot of it has to do with the fact that i speed up a lot of my footage  so people are kind of asking like how long things take and things like that  this episode is going to be structured a little bit different it might be a  little bit longer because we're actually going to go through the steps together  so today we'll go through the burn process the brush process and the  finish process and we may use a couple of toys along the way all right guys  so the idea of this video is to teach you the technique step by step uh if  i can figure out the chapter dealie thing that youtube has now i will set  that up down below if i can't figure it out i will list in the description  the beginning of each step so you can just skip to that step if you'd like to  i will also list down below a playlist of all my Shou Sugi Ban videos if you feel  like this video is going to be too basic for you you can see what i did therecheck out this video cool coolall right so step one is always gonna be wood selection  what i use most often is just common wood pine  the the white pine that you can find in the big box store and you can also  use cedar and hemlock i've heard uh jody over inspire woodcraft i think he uses  i think he specifically uses hemlock in order to get this type of finish  you want to have a wood species that has a lot of soft cellulose material  because we're going to remove some of that in order to give us the texture  that we're looking for so yes hardwoods burn you can ebonize poplar all day long  as far as like exotics i really don't know because i haven't used too many  of them you can ebonize oak really well but those are hard woods they don't have  the grain pattern that you're looking for you really want to look for more  of a soft wood that has those kind of wide areas of soft cellouse material the  thing you need to remember when picking your lumber is that knots are your  friend when it comes to Shou Sugi Ban they give the piece interest they provide  a good contrast they're very appealing to the eye see how we have some we have  some wide grain and we have some narrow grain we got a couple of knots in here  i just already know this is going to look good this is going to have a good  patterning to it you want to kind of stay away from any sort of just  straight grain it's just not going to have any interest you're going  to want to avoid a lot of like really tight grain once you've selected your  wood the next thing you're going to do is pick a torch you can do this  with just about any torch it just a smaller torch is going to take  you longer try to avoid a torch with this kind of tip on it see how that's  just you've got a little tiny flame you want something more like this  your output's better your uh coverage is better your heat's better and then the  next step up would be something like puff the magic dragon here uh this is  what's called a weed torch or a roofers torch and this you hook up to like a  large canister of propane this type of torch you need a much higher outputusually you want to reserve that one for bigger projects uh if you remove the  moisture from the board too quickly it can cup and warp on you and i don't know  if you guys can handle these yet the next step up after that is these guys  this is when you really want to party with the demons okay so this  first one i'm going to do real time so you see about how long it takes  i am using the little torch i know this  is probably a little bit more accessible for a lot of you guysokay guys one thing i should have mentioned before we started there  uh was just make sure that you've got your ppe make sure you're wearing some  sort of gloves uh usually like not anything that has nylon in it nylon  melts like plastic and will adhere to you make sure you've got something  to protect your eyes just in case you got some sap that pops off at you or a  rogue ash you should always have a fire extinguisher handy  and i usually just carry around a little spray water bottle  that's just if i have any flare-ups i can do this while you're treating the  wood in between passes you can give it a quick spray down and that will kind of  mitigate a little bit of warping too so this is what i call a light burn and  this is more like a gator or a deep burn the biggest difference between the two  is you haven't really charred or burnt out any of the soft cellulose material  on the side you can literally go from here and and put like a seal coat on  here or a die or a stain and be totally good so you could keep this side as the  gator and you could seal it like that and i have done that in the past but  with this particular technique you want to take that char off  next we're going to talk about char removal there's a couple of different  ways you can do that you can use a nylon brush like this like just  something that you would use to clean a bathroom you can use a wire brush now  if you use a wire brush you're going to see tool marks in your finished product  and ain't nobody got time for tool marks  just kidding you may want those in there you may want to have that kind of  texture inside your piece and if you do that a wire brush is the way to go now  what i use most often are these nylon brushes they're actually nylocks brushes  from daiko i will link down below to these uh these brushes on amazon  you're gonna do this treatment for any length of time for more than  one or two projects these are totally worth it they'll save you so much time  and so much energy and so much elbow grease it's not even funny and then  even more recently i graduated to a flex shaft for my drill so when this  spins i can use the brush on this end and just kind of scrape it off  one thing that i can tell you that a lot of people don't know about this  technique is that the way you brush is almost as important as how deep you burn  and in my experience people's first time out they never burn deep enough  but the way you brush it is an art form in itself  now the biggest thing you want now is contrast so the way you control  the brush and holding the brush in places longer than other places will  give you contrast between your darks your mediums and your lights also  wear a mask for this one or you're gonna have black boogers for like the next weeksee it really makes a difference also to note that is a really fine  uh wire bristle brush you can get more aggressive ones that would take that  down faster and get a little deeper but as you can see this is from the nylox  brushes and then this one is from hand scraping and since i use that fine brush  you don't have a lot of tool marks if you use something more aggressive you'll  you'll see some more deeper scratches in there all right guys so i'm going to  burn the rest of those boards get them nice and crispy put a little stank on  them if you know what i'm saying and then i will brush them to make them  extra stanky and then we will be right back and we will go over finishingall right guys so if you notice while i was brushing i made it a point to  hit the large areas a little bit more to bring out some more of those lights  and i made sure to hit around all of the knots because that's going to be like  the what draws the eye to it is is those that contrast between those knots the  knots gives a little bit interest and things like that now two other things to  remember about brushing uh do not brush for too long you can burnish the wood  to the point where it won't take stain and usually it doesn't happen across the  piece it's just in one particular area which makes it look kind of funky the  other question i get all the time is how much do i sand after i do this i don't  um i these boards get smooth with the with the brushing process i do not do  any additional sanding unless i want to like specifically hit a highlight  area or something and since i got those brushes for the drill i don't even do  that anymore just finishing goes we're going to use a couple different products  i'll kind of give you the basics of them i'll i'll give you more of a low down  and a more specific finishing video the products we're going to be using today  this is a wood dye this is folk art wood dye it's uh their rendezvous color this  is actually a purple i also want to try this out this is a red metallic stain  this is from the creator of unicorn spit i don't believe these are available to  buy yet uh she sent me these out to give them a test so we're gonna give one a  test today on a test piece and then i have a blue tinted stain that i picked  up at sherwin-williams i have another crowd favorite this is sun bleach stain  by varathane you can pick this up at the big box store last but not least  some maker brand simple finish i may have lost the label along the way but  uh this is a this is a wood oil uh it's it's actually amazing stuff so a lot of  times after i brush you'll have a little bit of residual i guess on there from  the the char dust that comes off i just take like one of these nylon brushes  and wipe it off sometimes if i have a bigger piece i'll uh i'll even hit it  with the hose and let it sit in the sun um or if or you can use like a  wet paper towel but you basically just want to get the debris off the surface  and there's one thing we believe in above all else around here at  Build DAD Build and that's whiskey is delicious but the other thing  is make sure you glove up before you put on finish glove up simple finish  it's kind of right there in the name you're gonna apply one coat you're  gonna wait about 10 to 15 minutes you apply another coat you come back 10  minutes after that and you just wipe the remaining oil off and you're done  stains you want to paint it on you want to let it sit for about  three to five minutes and then you want to come back and you just want  to wipe any excess off results may vary depending on how long you let  it sit eyes are a little different dies you just want an even coat on  there just make sure you don't have any puddling or anything like that  and then you're going to let them sit and a lot of times it dies you're going  to want to do two to three coats just to get the uh just to get where you want to  be the unicorn spit is unique in the sense that you can cut it with water  and turn it into a dye but i'm going to use it as a stain today so i'm going to  use it just directly out of the bottle the Folk Art ultra dye is ready to go  out of the bottle as well you can't water it down but i do what it won'tokay it's been about 20 minutes i came out about 10 minutes ago and i wiped  down the simple finish so this piece is pretty much done we're not going to put  a top coat on it or anything usually when you use an oil that's going to  be good enough okay so the next thing for the rest of these is they're going  to get a top coat but first we're gonna do something to give these a little bit  more contrast but what we're gonna do is i'm gonna take a piece of steel wool  and i'm gonna come in and i'm just gonna knock down some of the stain that's  on the darker spots to make those darker spots pop so do that on like  half the board and then we'll take a look at it and see what we think  um mileage may vary on this one you may want more contrast you may want  less contrast maybe you want less contrast you don't use the steel woolokay next what i'm gonna do is i'm just gonna hit it with a  clear coat like a clear lacquer this is something new from minwax i haven't  seen this before i just picked it up today so we'll see how it goes what  i'll do though is i'm going to block off half of this so i'm going to show you  with finish and without finish and then i'll go ahead and finish them all the  way and we can talk about them so you get an idea because finish will darken  your colors but it'll also make them a little bit more vibrant and interesting  what's up guys it is the next day uh i wanted to give that lacquer time to dry  now let's take a look at the results so first off we have the simple finish  this is as close as you're going to get to just like a natural finish  with the Shou Sugi Ban it looks pretty good the detailing in there is amazing  and it just gives the wood such a warm rich feel next up is the blue like i  said before the blue is a stain it is not a dye so it behaves a little bit  different than the when we get to the purple but see how like when i wiped  it away we actually even got some of the the natural wood color back but the blue  gets that extra depth in there just by giving away a little bit of that  that wood color next we have the sun bleached uh people always love this  one it is a white Shou Sugi Ban this one did the same thing when i took it  down with the steel wool you can still see a little bit of wood through there  gives it that just nice depth of color so we have the metallic red  uh the unicorn spit it's actually the name of this line is artistic vivations  and that gives it another dimension as well if you can see the shine kind of  come through there it's got a little bit of metallic sheen to it and finally we  have poiple this is the dye the dye is going to give it just kind of a little  bit more of a flat look but still give it like a rich detailing guys and then  there's just one more shot of them all together just kind of give you an idea  of what they all look like next to each other and of course this wouldn't be a  build that build video if we didn't finish it off with a little whiskey  i'm not smoking this one but if you want to know how to smoke whiskey  uh you can watch this video right herecheck out the merch kidsoh yeah oh yeah i'd like to take a second just to thank all my patrons  all these guys down here they're the ones that make the magic happen  uh the magic would not happen without them i would also like to welcome a  couple new patrons to the fray i'm looking at you Derek Coates Dean  Duplantis if that is your real name and Gabby Fernandez welcome friends  and as always a special shout out goes out to Nick the greek cheers  Steven Mann cheers and easy-eEric Weiss cheers brother  all right guys that's all i got if you have any questions leave me the comments  down below if you like this video hit that like button if you haven't  subscribed yet hit the subscribe button and until next time i gotta get to work  i really do i have a thing that i gotta buildand don't be worried if anybody tells you to kiss their converse  tell them to talk to me now if you'll excuse me for a minute  there's some boards that need tendin' to\n"