Project Wooden Clad Wall

[beech1948]

I'm just curios that so many people are saying it won't work and do not do it.

The subject wall is up, seems to be holding, looks fantastic. It up and done. What's the problem then.??

I was just being curious.

There are obvious issues of end grain glueing. Wood movement and given the original had different heights /thickness of wood used there are issues of bowing and cupping of thinner sections.

If I were asked to do this I would proceed as follows:-

1) Do 10 sections and join them as a proof of concept and wait to see what happens
2) I would use epoxy to glue up the various sections
3) I would experiment with veneer on MR-MDF and even use two layers of MDF to give occasional random thickness
4) I would use a backing board of MDF, painted black to attach the sections to with maybe 5mm gaps between each section. Smaller gaps may be possible but the OP would need to experiment to see what is possible.



I'll stop there.

 

[ScaredyCat]

No reason not to give it a go - even if it did fail you'd learn something

.

 

[maznaz]

Buy some sheets of Oak veneer online, you can get them in rolls. Buy some the same size as the half size sheets of 3mm plywood if you can. Get a couple of bits of melamine and a glue roller and glue your veneer to the ply, sandwich between the melamine and clamp it all up. It'll stick great and flat. Use a card scraper to deal with any glue that bleeds through. Then you have a perfect looking flat board of 3mm thick Oak that you can easily shape into segments of however you like. That technique makes really great looking thin veneer pieces.

 

[Freddyjersey2016]

I would agree with pieces of veneer stuck to a thin stable backing, e.g. MDF (and agree avoid most pallet wood). The other way to make your life easier is to use a tessellation that is a mix of hexagons and other shapes - search Google for tessellation with hexagons there are a number of different ones about. This should make it easier to fill the space with a smaller number of pieces to cut & glue, alernatively do a full height 60cm wide panel rather than cover the whole wall...

 

[Doug B]

A good friend of mine does this sort of thing, you need to know all your timber is sufficiently dry to avoid shrinkage & it takes extremely accurate working but done well it does look stunning, I’ve seen his lining the walls of a kitchen & it really is impressive.
This is a photos the parts laid out pre glue up, the timber is Wenge.

 

[Sgian Dubh]

A good friend of mine does this sort of thing, you need to know all your timber is sufficiently dry to avoid shrinkage & it takes extremely accurate working but done well it does look stunning, I’ve seen his lining the walls of a kitchen & it really is impressive.
This is a photos the parts laid out pre glue up, the timber is Wenge.

That does look very attractive, and obviously has taken a great deal of skill and care in the making. But I do still wonder how the wood movement affects the joints, and how he allows for this in the construction? After all, even if the wood is dry when the piece is made, it will still be affected by changes in relative humidity in service, i.e., it is bound to shrink and expand to some extent on a seasonal basis.

On the other hand, the photograph in Wooly89's first post I'm pretty sure is veneer over man-made board of some sort. When looking at the visible edges of the panelling, which is in a regular sequence of six horizontal triangular pieces, you can see the ground material, and the grain of the surface doesn't extend over the edges of the board underneath the veneer. I actually wonder if the construction in the original photograph shows a series of zig-zag edged panels laid one edge over the edge of the next one using a similar series of sloped frames attached to the wall behind to support it all. Slainte.

 

[thetyreman]

how did they deal with movement in parquet flooring? surely same principles apply to this

 

[TheTiddles]

how did they deal with movement in parquet flooring? surely same principles apply to this

You know when a parquet floor is all loose or buckled and looks terrible? Like that...

Aidan

 

[Inspector]

Going by the picture in the OP's second post he was looking at a rough/rustic look derived from pallet wood. That wood with its knots, roughness, different species, weathering, nail holes etc implies gaps from shrinkage are going to be part of the look being sought. I took the picture in the first picture as an illustration of pattern, not necessarily of fit and finish. Is Wooly89 even reading this thread anymore?

Pete