I'm sure what I did was technically wrong or horribly bad practice, but I used a slightly different technique for a IIPA recently.
I got a couple of bags of oak and apple chunks from a moonshine distillery. The chunks had been used to oak age moonshine in a stainless vat, so they cautioned me to not toss them in a gas grill because they'd explode with all the residual 'shine still in the wood.
We brewed a batch of IIPA, put appx 5 gallons of wort into the primary (on top of a yeast cake - SHOCK - double bad practice in one batch?!?) and took about a gallon and pitched it into a 2 gallon bucket on top of a few chunks of apple and oak. I reserved a small amount of yeast slurry for the 2 gallon split and pitched it directly and let it ferment on top of the wood.
I didn't assume that it would work perfectly, but I checked on the second bucket after the main batch finished and was surprised to find that it wasn't infected and tasted pretty darn good. The wood flavor was huge, but I figured it'd balance nicely once integrated with the main batch, so I racked it off into a pot and gave it a 15 minute boil just in case.
If we weren't pressed for time, I would have done a secondary of the combined beers since there was a little bit of sediment from the wood, but I just added my priming sugar to the wood-aged portion when boiling it, then dropped both in a bottling bucket and packaged.
The beer has aged very nicely over the last month and it's HUGE flavor country.