Minor update info on office system. 7 coats of Tung oil and 3 sandings with super fine steel wool, and the wood is looking spiffier on the Eufonika amp. It also got some Amperex tubes. This rig is making me respect the HD-6xx more than before. Especially at low volume. Can’t wait for the ZMF Auteur Classic LTD 2024s to be done.
Any woodworkers out there who can tell me when I’m done adding coats of Tung oil and sanding? I’ve been doing 2 coats, sand, repeat. Not hard sanding. I’d kind of like to have all of the grain filled in, and have a slightly satin finish. The Tung oil instructions say to put it on, then rub with lint free cloth after 15 minutes. Not happy with how that looked, the sand repeat does better.
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Wood is often moody, especially Eufonikan Eastern European (EEE) mystery wood. Do you know the wood type? Some oils require a lot of time to polymerize to a good/final look. With linseed oil as a base it can take…weeks or months to cure…and then may require once-a-year touch ups… Per my antique store adventures, really old oil-based finishes sometimes go black over time and sometimes fade to nothing.
I’ve not used much Tung oil, but the brand and formulation of the oil can matter a lot.
My Bottlehead Crack’s Northwest alder porous base soaked up everything I poured on it and asked for more. It went semi-transparent until the liquids dried, and then the bulk of whatever vanished to nothing. I used a mix of black walnut juice in water (yellow-brown), charcoal, and boiled linseed oil. I wasn’t happy until I overcoated it with charcoal and oil. It took lots of layers and patience. The linseed oil has darkened over a long, long, long time. It’s now about the same color as a medium-dark walnut.
They will scale to infinity until you compare them with a next-tier headphone.
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Extreme side-by-side closeup of the Crack’s finished alder wood (left) to the Decware’s walnut (right). I have no idea how the walnut may have been treated during finishing, and I think it’s quarter-sawn so the grain functions a bit different than a flat cut. It’s also shinier per a synthetic poly top coat.
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I’m guessing that it might be boxwood. It’s interesting that Crack uses alder, as there is a European species called the “Crack Alder”.
I have no end-grain to take a photo of, and it’s hard to id from finished wood. I can always write and ask!
I searched and found that the Eufonika Etsy H7m page says oak when you expand the detail pane.
Coarse open-grain oak will never result in a super fine finish – it’s the rustic king. I see lots of potential snags in your photo too. The builder may not have raised the grain with water and sanded before finishing it. Smoothing those snags could be a challenge unless you remove the wood from the electronics, and still, you’ll always be limited by the inherent resolution and strength of the grain.
If you really want it smooth, maybe a thick poly coat to fill the holes followed by a deep sanding and then another poly coat? Stabilized wood is produced by embedding it with a polymer, and how objects can be made from otherwise unsuitably soft and fragile wood. Thin and soft natural oil finishes may never get you there.
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I’m a bit lazy. When I first looked at it, I thought I should really sand well, use sanding filler and then put on satin poly. I’m aware of the snags. Was a bit surprised at how much natural oil gets drawn into the rough part of the grain and seems to never build any depth.
The photo is 24 hours post wipe-down with Tung Oil, and with no hand sanding done. Perhaps I should pick up a super fine grade sponge sanding block instead of using steel wool (which I had handy from another project).
It is much better than when I got it. Question is how much I care. Probably more after the ZMFs come to sit nearby.
Check out the reviews and instructions for your Tung oil. The cure time may be several days. With my boiled linseed oil, later coats would reactivate semi-cured earlier coats and make everything soft and gluey. I could uncure the earlier layers for a month or more. It stopped sponging up the oil after about 2 months, and after letting it just sit and dry for several weeks. I put on a very thick last coat (wet-look) and let it alone until the oil oxidized and turned dark. But, I was going for a vintage rather than refined look and started with fine-grained white wood.
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I like this idea. Would be cool if this was a forum section of its own (“Regulars’ Systems”?), viewable by all, but only members with a certain number of posts could start a thread, maybe?
Penn, I like the simplicity of your system. You’ve really cut out all the noise and landed on what even a hardened (but still reasonable) audiophile would concede is really all anyone needs. 
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