French Beams Again!

[Iceni]

Go to the Brico and buy any recommended paint on virette (?sp) killer. Buy all the required safety equipment. Take furniture outside and put on safety gear (I joke not as it is toxic but as many people do their beams and then go and live in the house and are still here, probably not as toxic as the old Flit [DDT] I was brought up with). Paint onto any area that shows NEW woodworm infestation. Leave outside (in barn perhaps) until dry and the smell goes away.

Now just to cheer you up, most holes are old holes and have nothing active living in them, ignore. Unless you are getting little bits of sawdust under the holes, the worm has long gone. Personally I would do the whole lot just to know I was safe.

A couple of years ago, John sent me a picture of a 'beast' that was walking over our patio. It turns out it was a Capricorn beetle. Ruddy huge. You can hear them chomping the beams if you have them. This is why so many beams have rough edges, they used to hack off the bits that the beetle were in - oak is so hard that most of them cannot get very far in - unless of course you have termites but that is another story. I have seen pictures of oak beams that were open to the elements for over 50 years, bugs, rain, hail, sleet and sun. They were not removed but kept in the roof and today you could not push a knife more than a centimetre into the beam.

Hope this helps

[Poolguy]

Understood.

Well furniture is a different story. I too have lots of these pieces of furniture. You have three options:

the first is to leave it alone and the bugs will much their way through over time and that is that.

The second is you could do as Iceni suggests and poison the lil critters but you have to get every hole as you can't be certainly that a hole has not still eggs in it.

The third and most effective is to deliver the pieces to a Autoclave facility which will zap it. The microwaves will toast everything which is alive but not harm the furniture. My friends who are master Antique restorers us this technique and tell me it is the only way to be sure. Although I don't have a contact in France but I am sure they exist - mainly in hospitals.

Hope that is helpful

Andrew