Before the era of the defined parquet, the wooden floors of the past were assembled in the rough, and after having glued them to the ground they were plastered, sanded and then dyed or painted with a transparent finish.
The pore of the wood was rather poorly receptive, as the sanding smoothed it to the point of closing much of the natural capacity of absorption of liquids. It goes without saying that the protection, which was applied by roller in the case of paints or cloth (or with special machines) in the case of oils, was rather a "plastic film" in its final effect (a little less with oils, because impregnating penetrated better the wood fiber emphasizing the natural design).
Nowadays wood is defined, that is to say varnish the parquet and define it before laying, stave by stave, so that it is also possible to obtain particular effects such as decay and hand planing or the saw plane effect (but these are themes that we will examine in more detail in the future).
How the brush works in the defined parquet floor
To ensure that the natural design of the wood emerges in all its three-dimensionality, the procedure of the brush tura is practiced. This consists of a treatment through which the staves, before painting or dyeing, are subjected to a forced treatment by means of one or more high-speed rotary brushes that dig the soft grain of the essence by means of steel cords teflon-coated (rolled).
The brushes can be more or less aggressive, made of more or less hard steel, with free wire (scratched effect) or with stranded wire, or in plastic material called Tane that fades out the openings of the flaming exalting even more the materiality.
Brushing has a particularly successful effect on wood with wide flames such as larch, but also on oak parquet it has very beautiful effects, as long as the depth of the excavation is not exaggerated. In this case, the risk is that of making coarse furrows which, even if partially filled in by subsequent applications of paints and varnishes, are difficult to keep clean over time, going the micro-dirt to undermine any ravine of the exaggerated porosity dug into the wood.
Advice on the type of brush to be requested for the parquet
It is always advisable to ask your parquet supplier for a medium brush, unless you like the rustic effect. In this case, you can also add the planed and sawn surface effect to the tura brush, or even better, fill by hand the cracks of a wood with a particularly rustic and coded choice and all those cracks that are normally filled flush with the wood surface. In this case you will perceive a wood dug also by the grouts, as shown in the following picture, which represented a French oak rustic wood treated, brushed in grade 5/5 with dark grouts grouted by hand.
brushed oak wood floor
This procedure allows not only to give depth to the parquet staves, but also to remove from the floor the wood paste that is particularly prone to scratches, as it represents the soft part of the plant. To be precise, the brushed part of the wood fibre is the part of the plant that grows in summer, with a lot of sunshine and little water and a lack of nutrients: in the case of oak, this part grows little and is narrow. The spring flame is the best nourished, so it is hard and wide. By cutting an oak trunk into sections, the circles of the growth rings, seen longitudinally to the trunk, draw the infinite combinations of the ever-changing flames of the wood. These are the flames that then become first lumber and then staves in solid oak or supported by parquet.
As we said above, there are various degrees of brushing: we at Parquet Sartoriale distinguish it in 5 degrees of depth for ease of communication, where the first almost does not dig the wood but is limited to making the pore absorbent, from 2 to 4 we talk about brushing more or less accentuated, while with grade 5 we identify a brushing so deep and rustic that almost no one proposes it.
brushed oak wood floor
If brushing is not enough for your desire to deconstruct the wood, you can exaggerate by requiring a sandblasted effect.
Is it possible to modify an already laid wooden floor?
A final consideration should be made about the possibility of brushing even a floor already laid: today it is possible thanks to machines with orbital brushes in steel and tynex, which do a job similar to that of the horizontal pre-finishing brushing machine, but which will inevitably leave more open flared flares of the flame, working with an orbital digging action and removing both horizontally and sideways the weak paste of the wood.
We have not talked about other essences of