Hi Guys. We are primarily a custom shop doing face frame residential cabinetry. We do on occasion do one-off furniture pieces for our designers. I have a project that a very good long-time client has asked us to consider doing. It is a small dry sink type piece with legs and they are wanting to do it in a hand-hewn, reclaimed oak look. I can probably source enough re claimed actual hewn pieces, but I'm wondering if any of you have successfully replicated that look with new material. Is there a way to do the hand-hewn look without learning to use an adze lol?

We used to do quite a bit of this in my shop, but not so much the last 10 years. What worked best for us with furniture parts needing a hand hewn look was a spokeshave. I grind the blade to have a shallow convex radius so the edges of the blade wouldn't dig in. Then we would use slightly overlapping strokes of varying length until the whole part was textured. This works best on individual parts before assembly. It takes a little practice to read the grain so that you don't get too much tearout. Straight grain wood is definitely easier to spokeshave, especially on flat surfaces like table tops. We tried several different brands and types of spokeshaves and found the Stanley #151 model worked the best for us.

Lee Valley sells a scrub plane, and some blades for this effect. Hone them and watch the grain, it should provide what you want.