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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;2manybooks, post: 420483, member: 8267&quot;]An article on antiquetrader.com explains the technique:</p><p><br /></p><p><a href="http://www.antiquetrader.com/antiques/furniture-detective-watching-cheap-tricks-fake-finishes/" target="_blank" class="externalLink ProxyLink" data-proxy-href="http://www.antiquetrader.com/antiques/furniture-detective-watching-cheap-tricks-fake-finishes/" rel="nofollow">http://www.antiquetrader.com/antiques/furniture-detective-watching-cheap-tricks-fake-finishes/</a></p><p><br /></p><p>&quot;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.&quot;[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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