Featured What kind of wood is this?

Gorgeous dog, caroln.

 

No, I don't think it's an imitation & not veneer either. It's a revival piece and "inked" is similar to paint i am guessing only using ink to decorate the wood underneath, wait for @verybrad to supply details.

 

I agree, very gorgeous.
I am going to get a small puppy for my son soon, because he is the only child and he said he feels lonely.

 

Thank you. I feel like I'm becoming a nuisance...I appreciate your help.

 

Thank you! He's such a sweetie. Loves everybody.

 

Not at all! Sometimes these things take awhile to sort out, Brad is very knowledgeable on this era of furniture. I am interested myself in how this was done.

 

You are never a nuisance. You have genuine questions about an interesting piece that had many people puzzled for a while. But we're getting there, thanks to Brad.

 

Caroln: those are exactly the side pieces I was talking about! Yours is easier to make than that other example. (And why is that yellow-orange bed decorated in Manischevitz satin??)

Love your doggie!!! My two favorite breeds are English Setters and Gplden Retrievers - ladies and gentlemen all.

 

That will be so good for him.

 

These were a much cheaper imitation of oak and, if done well, hard to distinguish from real oak without close inspection. Quite often, unsuspecting people try to refinish these pieces with disastrous results. I am not entirely sure of the process but believe the pattern was applied with a roller. The piece was then coated with a tinted lacquer to give the oak color. The base wood is usually poplar. The process fell out of favor in the 30s. I don't know if, perhaps, veneers became better/cheaper at that time or why. By the 40s, other methods for creating false grains were developed and used.

Was able to find this pic of a false grained piece showing finish damage:



Here is the front of the same piece. Note how the grain repeats itself identically on the two drawers, albeit offset by about a foot.

 

Alrighty then, there you have it! It was used as a substitute for veneer which makes sense if trying to reduce cost.

 

This thread has been very informative. I have seen (and even owned) grain-painted wood, but never heard of "inked" before.

 

Indeed, i was totally unaware of this furniture or process to make it.

 

An article on antiquetrader.com explains the technique:

http://www.antiquetrader.com/antiques/furniture-detective-watching-cheap-tricks-fake-finishes/

"However, by the end of the 19th century the deception became commercial rather than individual. In 1885, an inventor in Grand Rapids named Harry Sherwood came up with a system to mechanically grain just about any wood to look like the most popular wood of the time – quarter cut golden oak. Quarter cutting oak to produce the prominent “tiger eye” design is an expensive process both in material and in labor time, and this new system allowed Sherwood to open a new business based exclusively on his deceptive graining practices. Flat surfaces were stained and then grained with large inked drum rollers that produced the distinctive pattern. Curved pieces were grained by hand using small specially carved rollers. Many furniture manufacturers of the time quickly adopted the technique, and it was in widespread use by 1910. The furniture looked “right” to the uneducated customer’s eye, but it was made of significantly less expensive material like softwood pine instead of quarter cut white oak. The surprise would come many years later when one of these pieces needed to be refinished. What had looked like a solid oak chest turned out to be a plain softwood chest after it was stripped. Many refinishers had a lot of explaining to do."

 

Yes, rollers. I've seen oldish ones for sale here. Fascinating things.

 

Hi,
I have five or six rollers for putting down "oak graining" and such. One came with a booklet on how to do it but it has been lost or misfiled somewhere. i used the rollers to faux grain some closet doors. They passed inspection as long as you did not get real close or know what you were looking at.
greg

 

Oh, wow, what a lot of interesting info! I guess my bed's got a phony finish, but it's got a good back story now! Thank you so much everyone.

 

One more comment and then I'll zip it! I went back and looked at the bed on vendio.com that was identical to mine. It says that there's some chips in the "veneer". But now I'm wondering, is it really veneer or is it like mine, ink grained. They're selling that bed for over $800! Makes a person wonder …

 

The pics are small but, I'd guess it's "inked" because the grain repeats itself as Brad described. $800 seems high to me but, I have no idea what an inked empire revival bed sells for though, wait for others to post.

 

I thought, too, that the pattern didn't seem as random as you'd find in nature. This is like detective work!