Veneering
Also called: laying veneer, hammer veneering
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Veneering is gluing a thin sheet of wood, the veneer, onto a solid or built-up base, the groundwork, so that the visible surface is a finer or more decorative timber than the piece underneath. It breaks down into two distinct methods: working by hand with a heated hammer, or working with a caul, a flat board or shaped press clamped over the work to hold the veneer down while the glue sets.
Hammer veneering and caul veneering
Hammer veneering uses very little moisture and just enough heat from the iron to melt the glue, so that the veneer is not overstretched. As the iron's heat sets the glue flowing, the veneering hammer squeezes the surplus glue out toward the edges of the sheet. Too hot an iron, though, can raise steam that stretches the veneer out of shape, and both the prepared groundwork and the veneer itself are glued before laying. A veneering hammer cannot lay marquetry, a picture or pattern pieced together from many small shapes of veneer, even where those shapes have themselves been cut by knife. Caul veneering works differently: where two panels are each veneered on one face only, they can be pressed together under a single shared caul. Nearly all veneering on new furniture today is done this way, with synthetic resin or casein glue, a glue made from milk protein, applied under clamping pressure rather than with a hammer at all.
Cross veneering
Strictly, cross veneering means narrow strips of veneer run across an item such as a door frame or a mirror surround. More generally, any veneer laid crosswise to the groundwork's grain is also counted as cross veneer.
Getting the grain right
The less common, but correct, way to veneer the base of a chest of drawers runs the veneer's grain in the same direction as the groundwork's grain beneath it: as Hasluck (1897) described it, "having the grain of the veneer running in the same direction as the grain of the groundwork." The trade has not always held to such care. As Jones (1920) recalled, "when veneering was in vogue a good deal more than it is to-day, much cheap and shoddy work was produced with inferior wood groundworks and bad veneer."