Red oak
Warm pinkish brown with a coarse, open grain that reads across a room.
lbf on the Janka scale
Inside the range we like for boards
Ash is 100 lbf harder than red oak, and sits inside the board range too.
Color
Light to medium brown with a reddish cast; a quartersawn face flashes with ray fleck
Where it came from
- Dried
- Kiln dried before anything is cut from it.
More about red oak at The Wood Database · Wood data: The Wood Database (Eric Meier)
Red oak is the oak of Midwestern farmhouse floors and kitchen cabinets, and it is common for good reasons: strong, local, and a grain bold enough to read from the far side of a room. We use it for furniture, where that pattern is the point.
Its pores are the whole story. The big earlywood vessels run open from end to end — blow into one end of a short dry offcut and air comes out the other. That is why red oak never becomes a cutting board or a serving board here: water and juice get into those pores and stay, and the wood darkens where it stays wet. Our boards and trays are maple, walnut, cherry and ash instead.
How it ages
The pink in a new piece settles toward a steadier brown over the first few years. The dark grain lines do not fade, so the pattern stays as strong as the day it was finished.
Knife feel
Not a knife wood, and we do not make it into one.
The bench is empty.
Red oak comes to the bench kiln dried and ready. See what came off the bench, or ask us to build something in red oak.