About oak furniture

Welcome to our oak furniture information page. On this page we will be adding various articles on oak furniture, to help you when choosing your new furniture if you would like to talk to us about any oak furniture related issues please do not hesitate to contact us.

The South Seas Trading Company team.

The difference between solid oak and oak veneer

The main difference between solid and veneered wood is that solid wood ‘does what it says on the tin' (it is solid parts of wood). Veneered wood is slices of the wood e.g. oak veneer glued onto another material, which could be cheaper wood or medium density fibreboard (MDF) or plywood.

To make a veneer the timber is sliced to around 2 - 3mm and glued to panels to make products such as furniture, doors or flooring.
The process of making a veneer is either by slicing large blocks of wood or a process called peeling. The appearance of the veneer depends upon the angle which the blocks are cut for wood grain and figuring requirements.
Many product variations can be achieved when using veneers. For basic products which do not have high emphasis on style and design a basic machining process is used for manufacture. For more complex furniture products a verity of high tech. machines are used to achieve the various effects in appearance. Veneers can even be made to look old or distressed.

Veneers can provide benefits in lowering the cost of some furniture making (i.e. for producing large panels at reasonable cost and making plywood,MDF and chipboard look like hardwood ).Conversely high quality veneers can be used in high end fine furniture/cabinet making.

Veneers can be used for a variety of parts in furniture manufacture and are popular on the side of wardrobes or cabinets or for full items of furniture including table tops and legs etc. As a customer you may not be a wood expert so here are a few tips that you could find useful when selecting new furniture and how to know if it is solid or veneered:-

Ask if it is completely solid, part solid/part veneered or fully veneered.

Have a good look at the item of furniture to see any signs of a veneer (you may see the thin layer of veneer around the edges of tops, panels, doors, drawers etc.)

Have a look under the item, is the wood the same as the top?

Look inside the drawers to see if the wood the same as the outside?

Try the weight of the item, solid oak products are extremely heavy (but also bear in mind that some veneered products may be heavy if, for example, a large amount of MDF is incorporated into the item.

Does it look and feel solid and accurately manufactured to a high standard?

If you still don't feel happy Google the product if it has a brand name.

Remember an expensive item of furniture may not mean it is 100% solid oak and the best quality.

Different types of joints on oak furniture

There are many different ways of joining oak together to make fine furniture over the next few paragraphs I will try to explain some of the many different way of joining oak and the reasons behind them.

Wood workers have been joining oak together for thousands of years a long, long time before there was high Tec machinery and fast acting glues, so traditional wood workers had to use what they could to join two bits of wood together to make furniture , this was mainly the wood its self.

Over hundreds of years wood workers perfected there joining methods and passed their skills on to the next generation of wood workers on so until we reached the industrial revolution, suddenly we could get a machine to the jobs which man had been doing for generations with the increases in technology over the last hundred years we are now able to mass produce furniture in large factories but still some traditional joining methods have been preserved.

As you will appreciate it is now not only faster to mass produce furniture in factories but also much cheaper, if you take a close look at most mass produced items of furniture you will see the way in which different part are joined together a few examples of these types of joints are outlined below:-

Butt joints -

A simple joint where two parts of furniture are cut and pushed together, then either screwed, dowel reinforced or nailed to hold them in place.

Knock-down Fasteners -

These are very common in flat pack furniture and also give the name KD to furniture e.g. KD (knock down or flat pack) and are very good in that the item of furniture can be knocked down and rebuilt over and over again, which is great for furniture that needs to be moved on a regular basis.

As you look at the above joining methods you will understand why there are done - they are easy to do, they can be done cheaply, the furniture can be shipped easier because of its Knock down design and it can be assembled by people in their own homes (providing they have the instructions!!)

The more traditional methods of wood working joints can still be found all over the world and even in factories which are mass producing furniture these methods just take a lot more skill and time to perform, some machines are also now available to help wood workers perfect these skills. Please see the section below on different types of traditional joints.

The Dovetail -

Probably the most famous of all wood working joints, this joining method has been around for many years and is widely used in cabinet making, there are a number of variations of the dovetail joint the name comes from the shape of the joint (similar to the tail of a dove) this joint can be used in various parts of furniture but is mainly used to join two bit of wood at right angles.

The wood is cut either by hand or machine one part is the tail and the other the pin they must be cut very well to ensure they fit perfectly together meaning no glue has to be used (although glue can be used in addition to the dovetail). One of the most common places to use this joint is on drawers or on some modern furniture you may see the joint on the front of cabinets as part of the design.

Bridle joint -

Again this joint has been used for many years and is quite simple one part of the wood is cut to accommodate the other, a grove is cut in one part and the other simply cut to slid in making a good joint which can then be held in position with either glue nails or screws.

The Mortise and tenon joint -

This method dates back thousands of years and is used around the world, this joint is similar to the bridle but as opposed to a grove a glue is made in one part of the wood and the other part is cut so as it may slide inside the hole making a great, tidy joint, again this can then be held in place with a number of methods including, pins, nails, glue, screws and wedges.

Tongue and grove joints -

Tongue and grove joints are widely used in flooring a paneling, the paneling can be used in furniture production mainly so as many parts of wood can be joined together, the method is easy most of the time one side of the board will have a grove and the other a tongue so they can slide together.

There are many more different types of joining methods in wood work and cabinet making, too many to talk about in this article but i hope this help you to understand the basics, so next time you look at some furniture take a second look and see how it has been joined together.

For more information on oak furniture please call our office on 01642 312456.

If you would like to use this information on your site please email use at info@southseastrading.co.uk

South Seas Trading now also offer a range of solid oak flooring and engineered oak flooring