Die deutsche Landschaft erkenne ich gleich. Danke für die guten videos und die ganzen Fragen in den Kommentaren die du beantwortest. Viele Grüße aus USA. -Oli
G'day HM, you sound like you're a Meteorologist as well ! my interest in the weather is related to primary production, a company called Marbut and Gunnersen established an air drying yard and kiln and a re sawing mill with a retail outlet in my town a stones throw from my house sixty or more years ago after having two German scientists travel around the country recording average yearly temperatures and relative humidity. They decided on Seymour Victoria because of it's logistical position with the branch of two rail lines and two highways but most importantly it was the most southern town North of the great dividing range so it had warm dry air from inland Australia a EMC of fourteen percent not to hot not to cold and not to wet that's why I dry my timber here in the goldilocks zone 👍.
I'm glad you mentioned removing the saw dust/chips. I have just started my own Alaska saw mill and drying over the past year in Georgia. I had a pine tree fall in my yard and processed and started drying it. I hand brushed the dust off but just after a month or so I saw mold growing quickly. I tried a broom but that didn't remove enough so had to use a wire brush. It removed a lot more "bound" dust. I believe it was because the wood was so saturated, literally dripping off the ends of the lumber, the broom or plastic brushes couldn't remove the dust. The wood is drying better with less mold but I still get a little. I had to go to 2 inch stickers also as 3/4 and 1 inch was not enough with our high humidity. I also live at a bottom of a hill so that doesn't help either.
oh yes, you're not in a good spot for drying.. pine likes to turn blue quickly in your neck of the woods. the only thing that can slow it down is milling the wood in the winter. although there is no guarantee of that in georgia either since winters there are generally fairly mild. the pitch in the pine will make the sawdust stick like a magnet, so you have correctly identified the need to get rid of it when the boards are cut. there are wire brush brooms available and they really well with sticky, pitchy woods getting the sawdust off the planks. if you can figure out from which direction the prevailing winds are coming and orient your stack so it catches the most wind, you should be able to cut down on the molding even more.. hope that helps... thanks for watching and commenting!!
You are sharing knowledge that you just can't find other places and in very great detail. As a new Sawyer starting out wanting to go from log to furniture you have been a big help. Thank you!
getting started is probably the most difficult step in any endeavor, and so the intent was to help folks like you get good results faster without having to go thru the growing pains of making the usual mistakes that turn a lot of people away from this sort of thing. there's a lot more to come on the subject of wood processing that will be a help to you and others like you. so thanks for watching and commenting, and if you ever have any questions about other aspects of woodworking, by all means fire away even if there isn't a video out on the subject yet.
Thanks for sharing your videos once again! I'm still stacking my walnut and cherry lumber and really appreciate your knowledge being shared. I'm having problems stacking what I have quick enough because we're having no humidity and cracking is taking place daily. I hope I'll be able to finish it on my own today. The boards are heavy for just this 125 lb women but, well worthy of the beauty in them.
always glad to be of help. to prevent some of the end cracks you can get some regular ol' paraffin wax.. an old candle will do, melt it and smear it on the face ends of the boards. that should slow down the rate of drying and keep the cracks from getting too crazy. even an old goopy thick water based or latex paint will do, you only have to seal off the pores on the face ends of the boards. if all you have an old oil based paint just keep in mind you'll have to cut off an inch more than with the wax. . if you have an old camo-net or burlap sacks you can also hang those over the ends of your stack to slow down that rate of drying at the ends. once a crack has opened up it can't be closed again, so it's important to get these measures into place as soon as possible. if you have any more problems give me a holler and we'll see what we can do to get your problem solved thanks for watching and commenting! :)
thank you for the positive feedback ! if there is something that can be improved upon or if missed something, by all means let me know. thanks for watching and commenting! :)
Thank you for the videos and for sharing your knowledge. I watched the second video in this series on my laptop just before going to bed last night. For some reason, it came on about an hour before daylight. I woke up to your theme music. Not a bad alarm clock. :)
Well done, i think it exlplans the subject pretty good, no need for extra science. I really like that woodland shot. It's not so much the precipitation here, that include the fog which is hardly more than over at yours. The real problem at my place is the soggy grounds, it's all wet around here which causes above average humidity levels.. With current day/night swings of 10 degC and more, i need to run a fan all night, otherwise in the morning everything is dripping wet in the shop. On the flip side, we don't suffer from continental climate conditions, so winters are quite warm and we have plenty of wind.
thanks, i'm no math whiz by any stretch of the imagination ..lol.. but i have made my peace with the subject because it does play a big role in what we do in this field. so i try to make minimal use of it wherever it's possible ... one of the ways i would get the point across when i was tutoring at the U of Idaho was by using either tangible objects or bringing the student in direct contact with a working facet of the subject matter. some people really responded well to the lessons and their grades really shot up once that barrier was broken. it's sort of what i'm trying to do here. by showing people something they see essentially every day but often don't make the connection, it helps open up their minds and get a better understanding of it. and then overcome the frustration of the apparent lack of progress.
Very interesting and informative. I really appreciate folks like you who share information with others and don't try to keep things a big secret just for your own use. I'm also curious as where you are located? I know in your first video you mentioned that you lived at one time in Idaho. Where are you now. Thanks again for the video's. Jim
hi Jim, yeah, this is actually a really deep and complicated subject and so i tried to render it into a format anyone could understand in fairly broad strokes what is actually going on, and what to look out for. when you throw the technical and scientific jargon out there, laymen just sit there going "wtf??!?" shake their heads and wonder where the hell that freight train just came from out of nowhere... it comes back to the old saying: if you can't dazzle 'em with brilliance, baffle 'em with bullshit.. well bullshit walks and i am one of those types of people that believe information and education should be free and dissemination of knowledge to others should be made as easy as possible. i'm not all knowing but what i do know i am gladly passing on to others so they don't have to sacrifice endless hours and precious resources to get it right. cheers, mike
the wood isn't mine, it belongs to a sawmill. in years past it went into furniture, window or staircase production. thanks for watching and commenting!
there are two videos that gives a brief peek into an actual kiln. since most people lack the resources to build and operate a commercial grade kiln it hasn't really been on the priority list, but is still on the list of to-do's
Thank you very much for the video. Maybe I miss something, but I can't figure out why would the wood moisture content change based on RH and not based on absolute humidity? It seem more logical to me that if for instance the wood is dry, it will absorb moisture based on how much water is actually around it and not based on how much water there is around it compared to maximum level possible. Maybe you know? Thank you so much..
wow! now there's an awesome question... hopefully i can answer it to where it makes sense. if wood is completely dry then yes, it will absorb some moisture. musical instruments for example are made from wood dried down to 5 to 7 percent moisture content. they do absorb some small amounts of moisture from the air. so your thought is correct. air dried lumber reaches an "equilibrium" of about 12 percent in some localities as low as 10. but that's after many years and many cycles of absorbing and giving off the moisture in turn. the creaks and squeaks you hear in timber framed and also in stick framed buildings when no one is moving around in them, is the change in moisture content. the wood is shrinking or expanding depending on the time of year. wooden houses are drier in the in the winter months due to heating, moister in the summer due to the lack thereof. cold air that is heated to room temperature is much more absorbent thus removes more moisture from the air in the winter because the RH changes dramatically when cold air enters the building and is heated up. this is also the reason that when you are laying a solid wood floor you need to leave a gap of roughly half an inch between the flooring and the wall. gluing the floor material down can cause the floor to buckle as humidity increases. laminate flooring doesn't have that problem but you still need to leave a gap due to temperature changes, although not as big a one. similarly when doing panels in cabinet doors: you need to leave a little room for expansion of the filler panel in the frame so it doesn't burst the frame when the humidity rises in the summer. wood also has a funny characteristic in that it lets water go much easier than it takes it in. this to porus/torus effect in the cell wall structure. it acts as a one way valve. this is keep the sap from running back down into the roots during the times the tree is active with photosynthesis. although water is a polar molecule and is pulled up into the crown due to polarity from the evapo-transpiration, it's first inclination is run back down. having a check valve in place guarantees one travel of the column in the bole of the tree.. there is an old german proverb: what's the difference between a bureaucrat and wood? wood is always (at) work(ing). hope that wasn't all too confusing. cheers mike
@@HolzMichel THANK YOU so much for the quick response. I still don't seem to find the answer though. If we'll take a cube of air, and let's say 1/2 of this cube is water vapor, and in the middle we'll put a piece of wood- this piece of wood will touch now equally distributed water at 50% of its surface. Now, if we'll change the temperature, the RH will change, but the wood is still touching 50% humidity no matter what. That's my point..
@@shonshon247 ..it's a real confusing topic. as the air temperature rises, relative humidity falls. there is a scale that illustrates this. example: at 0C and 100% RH you get fog. (fog of course can appear at any temp as long as the RH is 100%) if you raise the temp by one degree the fog disappears. the air has been able absorb the moisture. you still have the same amount of moisture present in the air of your cube. now if you raise the temp even more the air becomes even more absorbent and begins take away moisture from organic substances such as wood. organic substances usually take direct exposure to moisture i.e rain to substantially increase moisture content. while the air will give back some moisture to the wood as temps fall, the porus/torus action of the xylem won't allow the moisture to penetrate very deeply. once wood has reached a point of equilibrium of around 10 to 12 percent, the change in moisture content is usually never more than one percent. in some rare cases it can go as high as 2. what you are talking about is normally only possible in a kiln environment. in a kiln you can spray and create conditions that aren't present anywhere in nature on the planet. so in theory and in practice you are only partially correct. however you are not factoring in the ability of the air to absorb moisture with an increase in temperature. as temp drops and approaches the dew point, only then will you see any noticeable rise in wood moisture, and it would take a really long time for the wood to take in that moisture to the point it actually reverses the drying action. it is possible and can be done in a kiln, which is a remedy to correct kiln dried lumber if it experiences cell collapse due to a too rapid increase in kiln temp. you can do a really koolll little experiment and see how much moisture wood will take from the atmosphere due to changes in RH: cut cross sectional pieces of a 2x4 no more than a 1/4" in length. weigh them. then stick them in the oven at 140F for two hours. weigh them again. pput them back in the oven for another hour and weigh them once again..then leave them outside over night. weigh them again.. the change you see in the weight is the change in moisture content. divide your dry weight by the wet weight and multiply by 100.. then you'll have the actual moisture content. it should vary by about one to two percent. with such thin slices it could go up even more, again the porus/torus action is out of the picture here because of the thin nature of your chunks.
@@HolzMichel Thank you so much again. I think I am getting it now. I think I need to do some research on how heat actually makes air more acceptable to water, and that would close all remaining gaps in understanding. Thanks again!
Hello I have a question on drying a slab of suagr maple 4 3/8 thick. it was cut down in april and have cut the double live edge slab for a mantle. What is the best way to dry it without getting cracks and how fast should i dry it. Thanks and Love the videos HolzMichel.
my apologies for the tardy reply! first off you should keep that slab out of direct sunlight. the second is to stand it up with the butt end up with the maximum allowable airflow around it. under the eaves of a long overhanging roof or in an open sided shed or tobacco or onion drying shed. the important thing is that the slab has lots of air surrounding it as it dries. the old timers used to dry maple, hornbeam and birch in this fashion when kiln drying wasn't available or as wide spread as is today. the main objective is to disperse the remaining moisture in the wood and bring it down in a controlled fashion to prevent blue stain fungi from getting in. there are several species of blue stain fungi and they all consume the sugar in the sap of the tree that still remains in the wood after milling. if you haven't already and have read some of the other questions in the comment section of this or the other videos in this series, you should seal the ends of the slab with some kind of impervious substance that will inhibit moisture form escaping out the ends of the slab. this will prevent cracks from forming. you can use wax (bees wax or stearin based wax) or any kind of old goopy paint. grease would work too, however it will penetrate the wood and render the first six to 10 inches of the slab unusable. another thing to do is to take off the bark if you haven't done so already. edible woods such as maple, beech, birch and several fruit tree species are natural magnets for bark beetles. they will bore in and can destroy the live edge of the slab. if you are seeing little piles of frass (sawdust) then they are already in the wood. now if you are planning to use the slab as one piece, keep in mind that it will warp as it dries and you will see some cupping. there is no mitigation for this no matter how slow you dry it or how much weight you pile onto it during the drying process. if you choose to lay the slab horizontally on stickers, keep in mind that if the slab has to remain stain free, you will need to use stickers made from heart wood of spruce or something similarly resistant to fungi. but also not from a wood like oak that contain tannins. also wherever the stickers make contact with the slab you will probably see deep staining. which is the reason for standing up the slab with the butt end up. hope that helps cheers mike
@@HolzMichel No worries on Tardyness, i very much apreciate the info. It was very helpful. I will do what you have recommended and hope for as little cupping as possible. Thank you greatly. Gave a Great Day ENJOY.
i would like to dry my own lumber for my cabinet and furnture projects that would be full circle for me , feel the tree , process the lumber, build something cool, this is great stuff thanks god bless
while at the university of idaho i worked for the experimental forest for a while and taught a chainsaw class for a student work crew. we did a huge fire break around a piece of property on the edge of McCall, ID that the university inherited from a local doctor. so i'll be putting up a video on felling techniques and working with a chainsaw probably later this year.
that depends on where you're at and what type of wood you'll be using. if you're in the western united states you should be cutting dead standing lodge pole pine, spruce or tamarack. similarly in the east although lodge pole doesn't grow there but i have seen some nice log homes made of white pine. if you have to resort to cutting green wood then i recommend cutting it in the summer. leave it lay on the ground without taking the limbs off for at least 2 weeks preferably 3 to 4. that will remove most of the moisture fairly quickly. when the needles begin to fall off you're ready to rock&roll. you can also cut in the winter when there is plenty of snow on the ground which will make skidding the logs much easier. there won't be any need to leave the limbs on since the tree is dormant any way. keep in mind that your logs won't get below 25 to 30% if you're cutting green timber. dead standing will already be well below that if there is a crack the goes deep into the wood. the crazy thing about dead standing wood is the limbs will continues to transpire moisture (albeit at a much slower rate) so using dead wood is preferable to green. another mean and nasty trick to use if you have to use green timber, is to girdle the tree and let it dry out that way. you will have to cut about 3 inches deep all the way around so the sap wood is separated. simply cutting the bark off, can make the thing take up to 3 to 5 years to die off and dry out. as a general rule hardwoods don't lend themselves to make log houses as they usually don't have the length of bole to get the lengths needed to span a wall. hope that helps you a little, if you got ant more just fire away
i wanted to ask what state are you out of? nice looking country, PA? and whats your business? you know more than a forestry ranger with equal shop skills? Thanks
i'm living in europe, which is not where i wanna be in the world at the moment due to all the crazy goings on all around. i have several degrees from the university of idaho, a B.S. in forest resources, a B.S. in forest products with focus on harvesting and a B.A. in linguistics.
Die deutsche Landschaft erkenne ich gleich. Danke für die guten videos und die ganzen Fragen in den Kommentaren die du beantwortest.
Viele Grüße aus USA.
-Oli
G'day HM, you sound like you're a Meteorologist as well ! my interest in the weather is related to primary production, a company called Marbut and Gunnersen established an air drying yard and kiln and a re sawing mill with a retail outlet in my town a stones throw from my house sixty or more years ago after having two German scientists travel around the country recording average yearly temperatures and relative humidity. They decided on Seymour Victoria because of it's logistical position with the branch of two rail lines and two highways but most importantly it was the most southern town North of the great dividing range so it had warm dry air from inland Australia a EMC of fourteen percent not to hot not to cold and not to wet that's why I dry my timber here in the goldilocks zone 👍.
Fabulous series, super interesting, useful and informative, a huge joy to watch. Thank you for sharing!
I'm glad you mentioned removing the saw dust/chips. I have just started my own Alaska saw mill and drying over the past year in Georgia. I had a pine tree fall in my yard and processed and started drying it. I hand brushed the dust off but just after a month or so I saw mold growing quickly. I tried a broom but that didn't remove enough so had to use a wire brush. It removed a lot more "bound" dust. I believe it was because the wood was so saturated, literally dripping off the ends of the lumber, the broom or plastic brushes couldn't remove the dust. The wood is drying better with less mold but I still get a little. I had to go to 2 inch stickers also as 3/4 and 1 inch was not enough with our high humidity. I also live at a bottom of a hill so that doesn't help either.
oh yes, you're not in a good spot for drying.. pine likes to turn blue quickly in your neck of the woods. the only thing that can slow it down is milling the wood in the winter. although there is no guarantee of that in georgia either since winters there are generally fairly mild.
the pitch in the pine will make the sawdust stick like a magnet, so you have correctly identified the need to get rid of it when the boards are cut.
there are wire brush brooms available and they really well with sticky, pitchy woods getting the sawdust off the planks.
if you can figure out from which direction the prevailing winds are coming and orient your stack so it catches the most wind, you should be able to cut down on the molding even more..
hope that helps...
thanks for watching and commenting!!
You are sharing knowledge that you just can't find other places and in very great detail. As a new Sawyer starting out wanting to go from log to furniture you have been a big help. Thank you!
getting started is probably the most difficult step in any endeavor, and so the intent was to help folks like you get good results faster without having to go thru the growing pains of making the usual mistakes that turn a lot of people away from this sort of thing.
there's a lot more to come on the subject of wood processing that will be a help to you and others like you.
so thanks for watching and commenting, and if you ever have any questions about other aspects of woodworking, by all means fire away even if there isn't a video out on the subject yet.
Thanks
Thanks for sharing your videos once again! I'm still stacking my walnut and cherry lumber and really appreciate your knowledge being shared. I'm having problems stacking what I have quick enough because we're having no humidity and cracking is taking place daily. I hope I'll be able to finish it on my own today. The boards are heavy for just this 125 lb women but, well worthy of the beauty in them.
always glad to be of help.
to prevent some of the end cracks you can get some regular ol' paraffin wax.. an old candle will do, melt it and smear it on the face ends of the boards. that should slow down the rate of drying and keep the cracks from getting too crazy. even an old goopy thick water based or latex paint will do, you only have to seal off the pores on the face ends of the boards. if all you have an old oil based paint just keep in mind you'll have to cut off an inch more than with the wax.
. if you have an old camo-net or burlap sacks you can also hang those over the ends of your stack to slow down that rate of drying at the ends.
once a crack has opened up it can't be closed again, so it's important to get these measures into place as soon as possible.
if you have any more problems give me a holler and we'll see what we can do to get your problem solved
thanks for watching and commenting! :)
I'm really enjoying this series. Thank you!
thank you for the positive feedback ! if there is something that can be improved upon or if missed something, by all means let me know.
thanks for watching and commenting! :)
Great info Thank You
Well done, thank you for the series
thanks for watching and commenting! :)
Thank you for the videos and for sharing your knowledge. I watched the second video in this series on my laptop just before going to bed last night. For some reason, it came on about an hour before daylight. I woke up to your theme music. Not a bad alarm clock. :)
my pleasure :) .. kinda nice to know that someone is getting more than just a little bit of knowledge out of the videos ;)
Well done, i think it exlplans the subject pretty good, no need for extra science. I really like that woodland shot.
It's not so much the precipitation here, that include the fog which is hardly more than over at yours. The real problem at my place is the soggy grounds, it's all wet around here which causes above average humidity levels.. With current day/night swings of 10 degC and more, i need to run a fan all night, otherwise in the morning everything is dripping wet in the shop.
On the flip side, we don't suffer from continental climate conditions, so winters are quite warm and we have plenty of wind.
thanks, i'm no math whiz by any stretch of the imagination ..lol.. but i have made my peace with the subject because it does play a big role in what we do in this field. so i try to make minimal use of it wherever it's possible ...
one of the ways i would get the point across when i was tutoring at the U of Idaho was by using either tangible objects or bringing the student in direct contact with a working facet of the subject matter. some people really responded well to the lessons and their grades really shot up once that barrier was broken.
it's sort of what i'm trying to do here. by showing people something they see essentially every day but often don't make the connection, it helps open up their minds and get a better understanding of it. and then overcome the frustration of the apparent lack of progress.
Very interesting and informative. I really appreciate folks like you who share information with others and don't try to keep things a big secret just for your own use. I'm also curious as where you are located? I know in your first video you mentioned that you lived at one time in Idaho. Where are you now. Thanks again for the video's.
Jim
hi Jim,
yeah, this is actually a really deep and complicated subject and so i tried to render it into a format anyone could understand in fairly broad strokes what is actually going on, and what to look out for. when you throw the technical and scientific jargon out there, laymen just sit there going "wtf??!?" shake their heads and wonder where the hell that freight train just came from out of nowhere...
it comes back to the old saying: if you can't dazzle 'em with brilliance, baffle 'em with bullshit.. well bullshit walks and i am one of those types of people that believe information and education should be free and dissemination of knowledge to others should be made as easy as possible. i'm not all knowing but what i do know i am gladly passing on to others so they don't have to sacrifice endless hours and precious resources to get it right.
cheers,
mike
Very informative and well explained thanks
Thats a lot of wood you have there , where does it all end up?
the wood isn't mine, it belongs to a sawmill. in years past it went into furniture, window or staircase production.
thanks for watching and commenting!
Would love to see more of these. Maybe something about kilns as well.
there are two videos that gives a brief peek into an actual kiln. since most people lack the resources to build and operate a commercial grade kiln it hasn't really been on the priority list, but is still on the list of to-do's
@@HolzMichel that would be amazing, love how you describe things!
Do you have the name or link of those videos?
here's a little something on real working kilns:ua-cam.com/video/tlMRLxeH_CUh/v-deo.htmlttps://ua-cam.com/video/Xdd5UORKClY/v-deo.html
I learned a lot - thank you for this.
you're quite welcome. this video has seemed to helped a lot of folks which is what the intent was.
thanks for the feedback and watching :)
Just started milling lumber on our land. Ohio hardwood. Gonna air dry the lumber. Your videos are very helpful and I thank you.
Thank you very much for the video. Maybe I miss something, but I can't figure out why would the wood moisture content change based on RH and not based on absolute humidity? It seem more logical to me that if for instance the wood is dry, it will absorb moisture based on how much water is actually around it and not based on how much water there is around it compared to maximum level possible. Maybe you know? Thank you so much..
wow! now there's an awesome question... hopefully i can answer it to where it makes sense.
if wood is completely dry then yes, it will absorb some moisture. musical instruments for example are made from wood dried down to 5 to 7 percent moisture content. they do absorb some small amounts of moisture from the air. so your thought is correct.
air dried lumber reaches an "equilibrium" of about 12 percent in some localities as low as 10. but that's after many years and many cycles of absorbing and giving off the moisture in turn.
the creaks and squeaks you hear in timber framed and also in stick framed buildings when no one is moving around in them, is the change in moisture content. the wood is shrinking or expanding depending on the time of year.
wooden houses are drier in the in the winter months due to heating, moister in the summer due to the lack thereof. cold air that is heated to room temperature is much more absorbent thus removes more moisture from the air in the winter because the RH changes dramatically when cold air enters the building and is heated up.
this is also the reason that when you are laying a solid wood floor you need to leave a gap of roughly half an inch between the flooring and the wall. gluing the floor material down can cause the floor to buckle as humidity increases.
laminate flooring doesn't have that problem but you still need to leave a gap due to temperature changes, although not as big a one.
similarly when doing panels in cabinet doors: you need to leave a little room for expansion of the filler panel in the frame so it doesn't burst the frame when the humidity rises in the summer.
wood also has a funny characteristic in that it lets water go much easier than it takes it in. this to porus/torus effect in the cell wall structure. it acts as a one way valve. this is keep the sap from running back down into the roots during the times the tree is active with photosynthesis. although water is a polar molecule and is pulled up into the crown due to polarity from the evapo-transpiration, it's first inclination is run back down. having a check valve in place guarantees one travel of the column in the bole of the tree..
there is an old german proverb: what's the difference between a bureaucrat and wood? wood is always (at) work(ing).
hope that wasn't all too confusing.
cheers
mike
@@HolzMichel THANK YOU so much for the quick response. I still don't seem to find the answer though. If we'll take a cube of air, and let's say 1/2 of this cube is water vapor, and in the middle we'll put a piece of wood- this piece of wood will touch now equally distributed water at 50% of its surface. Now, if we'll change the temperature, the RH will change, but the wood is still touching 50% humidity no matter what. That's my point..
@@shonshon247 ..it's a real confusing topic. as the air temperature rises, relative humidity falls. there is a scale that illustrates this.
example: at 0C and 100% RH you get fog. (fog of course can appear at any temp as long as the RH is 100%) if you raise the temp by one degree the fog disappears. the air has been able absorb the moisture. you still have the same amount of moisture present in the air of your cube. now if you raise the temp even more the air becomes even more absorbent and begins take away moisture from organic substances such as wood. organic substances usually take direct exposure to moisture i.e rain to substantially increase moisture content. while the air will give back some moisture to the wood as temps fall, the porus/torus action of the xylem won't allow the moisture to penetrate very deeply. once wood has reached a point of equilibrium of around 10 to 12 percent, the change in moisture content is usually never more than one percent. in some rare cases it can go as high as 2.
what you are talking about is normally only possible in a kiln environment. in a kiln you can spray and create conditions that aren't present anywhere in nature on the planet. so in theory and in practice you are only partially correct. however you are not factoring in the ability of the air to absorb moisture with an increase in temperature.
as temp drops and approaches the dew point, only then will you see any noticeable rise in wood moisture, and it would take a really long time for the wood to take in that moisture to the point it actually reverses the drying action. it is possible and can be done in a kiln, which is a remedy to correct kiln dried lumber if it experiences cell collapse due to a too rapid increase in kiln temp.
you can do a really koolll little experiment and see how much moisture wood will take from the atmosphere due to changes in RH:
cut cross sectional pieces of a 2x4 no more than a 1/4" in length. weigh them. then stick them in the oven at 140F for two hours. weigh them again. pput them back in the oven for another hour and weigh them once again..then leave them outside over night. weigh them again.. the change you see in the weight is the change in moisture content. divide your dry weight by the wet weight and multiply by 100.. then you'll have the actual moisture content. it should vary by about one to two percent. with such thin slices it could go up even more, again the porus/torus action is out of the picture here because of the thin nature of your chunks.
@@HolzMichel Thank you so much again. I think I am getting it now. I think I need to do some research on how heat actually makes air more acceptable to water, and that would close all remaining gaps in understanding. Thanks again!
Hello I have a question on drying a slab of suagr maple 4 3/8 thick. it was cut down in april and have cut the double live edge slab for a mantle. What is the best way to dry it without getting cracks and how fast should i dry it. Thanks and Love the videos HolzMichel.
my apologies for the tardy reply!
first off you should keep that slab out of direct sunlight. the second is to stand it up with the butt end up with the maximum allowable airflow around it. under the eaves of a long overhanging roof or in an open sided shed or tobacco or onion drying shed. the important thing is that the slab has lots of air surrounding it as it dries.
the old timers used to dry maple, hornbeam and birch in this fashion when kiln drying wasn't available or as wide spread as is today. the main objective is to disperse the remaining moisture in the wood and bring it down in a controlled fashion to prevent blue stain fungi from getting in. there are several species of blue stain fungi and they all consume the sugar in the sap of the tree that still remains in the wood after milling.
if you haven't already and have read some of the other questions in the comment section of this or the other videos in this series, you should seal the ends of the slab with some kind of impervious substance that will inhibit moisture form escaping out the ends of the slab. this will prevent cracks from forming. you can use wax (bees wax or stearin based wax) or any kind of old goopy paint. grease would work too, however it will penetrate the wood and render the first six to 10 inches of the slab unusable.
another thing to do is to take off the bark if you haven't done so already. edible woods such as maple, beech, birch and several fruit tree species are natural magnets for bark beetles. they will bore in and can destroy the live edge of the slab. if you are seeing little piles of frass (sawdust) then they are already in the wood.
now if you are planning to use the slab as one piece, keep in mind that it will warp as it dries and you will see some cupping. there is no mitigation for this no matter how slow you dry it or how much weight you pile onto it during the drying process.
if you choose to lay the slab horizontally on stickers, keep in mind that if the slab has to remain stain free, you will need to use stickers made from heart wood of spruce or something similarly resistant to fungi. but also not from a wood like oak that contain tannins. also wherever the stickers make contact with the slab you will probably see deep staining. which is the reason for standing up the slab with the butt end up.
hope that helps
cheers
mike
@@HolzMichel No worries on Tardyness, i very much apreciate the info. It was very helpful. I will do what you have recommended and hope for as little cupping as possible. Thank you greatly. Gave a Great Day ENJOY.
i would like to dry my own lumber for my cabinet and furnture projects that would be full circle for me , feel the tree , process the lumber, build something cool, this is great stuff thanks god bless
while at the university of idaho i worked for the experimental forest for a while and taught a chainsaw class for a student work crew. we did a huge fire break around a piece of property on the edge of McCall, ID that the university inherited from a local doctor. so i'll be putting up a video on felling techniques and working with a chainsaw probably later this year.
What is the best time of year to cut trees down.? .. looking to make a log cabin
that depends on where you're at and what type of wood you'll be using. if you're in the western united states you should be cutting dead standing lodge pole pine, spruce or tamarack. similarly in the east although lodge pole doesn't grow there but i have seen some nice log homes made of white pine.
if you have to resort to cutting green wood then i recommend cutting it in the summer. leave it lay on the ground without taking the limbs off for at least 2 weeks preferably 3 to 4. that will remove most of the moisture fairly quickly. when the needles begin to fall off you're ready to rock&roll.
you can also cut in the winter when there is plenty of snow on the ground which will make skidding the logs much easier. there won't be any need to leave the limbs on since the tree is dormant any way.
keep in mind that your logs won't get below 25 to 30% if you're cutting green timber. dead standing will already be well below that if there is a crack the goes deep into the wood. the crazy thing about dead standing wood is the limbs will continues to transpire moisture (albeit at a much slower rate) so using dead wood is preferable to green.
another mean and nasty trick to use if you have to use green timber, is to girdle the tree and let it dry out that way. you will have to cut about 3 inches deep all the way around so the sap wood is separated. simply cutting the bark off, can make the thing take up to 3 to 5 years to die off and dry out.
as a general rule hardwoods don't lend themselves to make log houses as they usually don't have the length of bole to get the lengths needed to span a wall.
hope that helps you a little, if you got ant more just fire away
i wanted to ask what state are you out of? nice looking country, PA? and whats your business? you know more than a forestry ranger with equal shop skills? Thanks
i'm living in europe, which is not where i wanna be in the world at the moment due to all the crazy goings on all around.
i have several degrees from the university of idaho, a B.S. in forest resources, a B.S. in forest products with focus on harvesting and a B.A. in linguistics.