Drying Tropical Woods

Jim King, in a reply to a question about wet bloodwood, also answered a number of questions about drying tropical woods:

Bloodwood, as with most tropical woods can be laying around ten years and if it is over two inches thick, will probably be wet inside. We work with it every day and the easiest way to dry it quickly is just put it on the stove and boil it a couple of hours after it is rough turned. It will be bone dry in ten days.

The thing I try to get across to people is that tropical woods are not normally kiln dried unless in boards. The kiln schedule for 4 inch thick dense tropical woods is months in the kiln and no one is really going to do that, even though most say they do.

From my 20 plus years working with tropical woods, I have found the best solution is to turn them rough wet and then boil them immediately.

Tropical woods are not to be set on the shelf and admired as collectors' items and let to dry unless you want tooth picks. When you get some, turn it immediately and make believe it is a lobster and throw it in the pot. I just took a photo today of our boiling pot for our new web site we are building: exoticwoodworld.com. It looks a bit nasty as we boil six to eight bowls a day. We normally try to boil at a minimum an hour per inch but if the fire keeps going for three or four hours it does no harm. As I can understand, the boiling simply takes out the sticky sap and replaces it with simple water which dries in a few days. I don't know if you could boil it too long, but we have had the pot full and kept adding water for several hours, and the results are all good.

In the process I described above I am referring to the rough turned blanks turned down to 1 to 2 inches thick. And yes, we have species that we boil in square blanks also to prevent cracking. We are now experimenting with boiling and drying gunstock blanks out of some of the high figure woods. Never having really worked with North American or African woods I cannot say much but I would certainly think boiling ebony, pink ivory and some of the other extremely delicate woods would be beneficial. Just be sure to let the wood cool down to room temperature in the water. Don't take it out before the water cools with the wood in it. Just set it in a shady place in the shop and in ten days it should be bone dry.

I have never tried to bend bloodwood by boiling as it is not one of my favorites, but we have successfully boiled and bent ¼" by 2" slats of other dense species to make woven chair backs.