Thursday, 15 November 2007

Another table...oak again ;)


Well...this time I only made the top....but it´s oak...treated with ammonia to get that old brownish look....
Let me say something about working with ammonia....
My mentor and former partner told me the trick with ammonia on oak. Oak got a substance called Garv syra (swedish name) in it....some sort of acid (oak splinters sting), so when you apply ammonia the acid reacts and starts to age instantly. This is an old trick...back in the days the put oak planks or battens in a tent and a cup of ammonia...and voila, 24 hours later the oak looked a 100 years old.
Applying it with a cloth or a brush is just speeding things up...now...
Said and done that´s what I was about to do. Ammonia smells a bit...actually, ammonia 25% concentration smells horrible...I found that out making this table top.
I opened the fresh bottle and started to apply it and....GOD DAMN IN HELL WHAT THE F*** JUST HAPPEND!!!!!!
My whole body said - NO NO NO NO....GET THE HELL OUT OF THERE....man what a rush...I could´nt see nor breathe....no mask on me stoopid retard.
But I had to finish or else the top would have been destroyed.
I had to hold my breath, splash on some ammonia, run across the carpentry to breathe for a sec....run back...splash some more...run away...gees...honestly, I thought I would die. I have never felt a body chock like that before, and god knows I have been in some pretty serious accidents.
Ammonia that concentrated puts your system into chock...believe me. 20 minutes AFTER I was finished my new boss came. He opened the door of the carpentry and had to get out after 1 sec.
- Did you work in there....he said....well....yeah...doh.
So...next time some darn customer wants his/hers oak table treated with ammonia I will damn sure use a big ass mask....with oxygen tubes....a whole freaking space outfit...cause no way in hell I will put my body through that again.
Stay away from ammonia...only weightlifters and stoopid carpenters uses that ;)
Carry on.....

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

haha, det var en upplevelse om inte annat :D "Fan vad det stinker ammoniak" från rörmokarna.. man går ut i snickeriet och det hugger till i lungorna och börjar direkt spruta tårar ur ögonen... timo står och snorar över det där jävla bordet och du står bredvid och undrar hur fan gubben kan hålla på! Det var nåt skumt med den där flaskan.. no doubt about it... ;)

Mark N said...

There you go with the bloody Swedish again. Some of us can't speak it, you know!

Anyway, as for ammonia, I used to work with it a lot. When I worked in a plant making paint, we used to pour a little bit under the bathroom door and watch the person in there run out with there pants around their ankles, gagging and coughing and gasping for fresh air.

A mile from the plant I worked in was another plant that housed 100% pure ammonia. They had pipelines running in front of our building. 100% ammonia will get you in under 3 seconds if you breath it in. Fortunately, we never had a pipe leak and the plant never exploded. If that happened, hundreds of thousands of people would die in a matter of hours.

I know all about it. People think the 1% stuff they buy at the store for cleaning purposes is bad... try 3%-15%. 25% is border-line deadly. Anything above that is suicide to use if you aren't wearing a mask.

Janne, Janne, Janne. No wonder you are the way you are. You've killed off a couple million brain cells!

Daddy Cool said...

WOOHOO...I pwnd my braincells....the score is -
Janne - 1
Braincells - 0

;)

Anonymous said...

hehe, it was an experience I'd say :D "God Damn it smells like ammonia!" from the plumbers.. I went out into the main carpentry and the ammonia directly stung my lungs and tears came gushing from my eyes... Timo(the former owner of the carpentry) is standing over the table just rubbing the ammonia in, snot gushing from his nose and janne stands next to him wondering just how the hell the old man can go on like that! the ammonia in that bottle was foul.. no doubt about it... ;)

that's what I said earlier in case you were wondering mark... :P

Mark N said...

Ah, yes. There's nothing quite like ammonia. Yeah, there's more dangerous stuff out there. I used to work with a chemical called Xylene. That stuff would eat through just about anything! But ammonia is in a little world of it's own.