Another question from the hoarder of wood....

Red Oak

Mark Mandell - Gone Round In New Jersey

Nah (unless you're making bows )

Walnut, yeah

Butternut, maybe

you are making mistakes

Bill Tindall, E.Tn.

Fact, you will never use but a tiny fraction of your lumber and the rest will be sold or burned. We sold 20X more 4/4 oak than 8/4, never sold any 6/4 and occasionally sold some 5/4. 8' lengths also a poor choice. 12' the optimum compromise of waste and ease of handling.

Another fact. Hobby woodworkers use but a piddly amount of lumber. You will never dispose of any meaningful quantity of your lumber to hobbyist. Production of your lumber needs to be geared to commercial customers that use at least hundreds of bdft a year, or a retailer. Many retailers will not buy from you.

You will never be rid of #2 common and less. You will not be able to sell into a market that uses it. Exception, you may be able to sell the 4/4 to farmers for construction lumber, about 30-50 cents a bdft.

Initially you need good air circulation to prevent various problems. This lumber needs to be stacked outdoors with a cover. It will dry over the winter enough to be ready to finish solar drying in early summer.

There is a product that uses lots of lumber and has little labor- stair treads and risers. 10' and 12' is optimum for this product. Your connections into the building trades may enable you to market this product.

Re: you are making mistakes

Barry Irby

Yes, I am sure I am.

I cut the tree down because it died. I am having it cut into lumber ... I'm not sure why. Sentimental reasons? Not to waste it? Because I am a pack rat?

Bill, thank you for taking the time to answer my inquiry so fully. They have not sawed the lumber yet so I may rethink it.

Thanks again.

One of my sayings is You shouldn't leave before you know where you are going. Part of the problem here is I have no plan. No project. No end use. Time to figure out what to do next.

Not for nothin'...

Jim Matthews

Once it's rendered, and you have selected what you want to keep - would you object to giving it away? Young people starting out can't afford much and decent lumber would help.

You're keeping it out of the landfill.

That's noble, itself.

*****

Uppa Heya in Coastal Massachusetts the Gypsy moth decimated our White Oak stands.

There are miles long stretches, stripped of leaves and taking down power lines.

It costs more to bring them down than they're worth.

Bill is unfortunately right - the value of commercial lumber is mainly in the rendering and curing steps, and limited to what can be quickly used for home construction.

****

If it were my tree, I would drop it and have it bucked to length on the yard.

Haul off anything that's not straight.

Hire an Alaska mill to have a look at the easiest round to handle.

If that flitch isn't fine, stop there.

If you do end up with a stack - it's a year (or more) per inch of thickness to get it dry enough to use in a shop. After beginning a purge of my basement stash I can say one thing certain about lumber : any board will be heavier going upstairs than down.

There is an idea

Bill Tindall, E.Tn.

Advertise free lumber to share cost of sawing and labor of stacking, drying and final result.

BTW Jim, the year per inch rule is utterly useless guide for how log it takes lumber to dry. This misinformation needs to purged from woodworking lore.

Re: you are making mistakes

Don Stephan

Donate the wood to a high school woodworking program, a local woodworking club, or a local woodturning club. The woodturning club probably would appreciate thicker slabs.

Re: Another question from the hoarder of wood....

TomD

Bill is talking from a commercial perspective. One thing I learned cutting my own wood is that I will never use it up. You get all the whatever (your case red oak), and you immediately find you are all about cedar and osage. By the time it dries you are on to something else. My experience mirrors bill on that.

I do not agree about the rest though. 2 inch wood is perfect for most things, if you have a good enough saw that you can resaw at will. It normally dries better in my experience, is more forgiving while drying, and you can make heavy door frames, a lot of parts for a bench, a trestle table. Much of your wood will come out flat sawn, so 2 inch is perfect for reducing to quarter sawn parts for door frames in a cabinet. It resaws with a lot of waste for bookmatches, but I find if I saw something from 3/4" It just takes one wiggle to ruin the result, if it is for raised panels you can resaw to the thicker sections from 2 inch.

You might want to get some 3 and 4 inch also, if you are into planes or bench tops.

Thicker pieces are half the stickering, and are stiff enough to survive a bad job. Basically 2 inch vs 1 mean you have half the gaps, and you can spread the stickers at least twice as far apart. Weight might be a problem depending on your strength and any material moving experience and tools. 1 1/2" would be a slightly less useful alternative, but still capable.

Apparently you have the re-sawing at a cost you can bear, and you can store the result. Yet Bill is saying "beware" because you will have more than you need, and it will not be in an efficient form for use. I don't see where those two issues are a problem if you have a fireplace. Should even out, and be practical for the home shop, yeah you will wast some wood, but you have it to spare. What really makes cutting your own wood work from a practical perspective is the ability to provide for all the oddball sizes and grain orientations shops do not stock or charge an arm and a leg for.

If it makes sense to your heart because you know the tree, it will be a good journey, and you will learn a new freedom of having access to wood in any form you want it in. It will be a pleasure to work compared to mill stuff. But you need a bandsaw, and you need the wood to not be all knotty and worthless for your intended use. Once you start cutting your own, at least up here in the north, you really wonder where all those veneer grade logs come from...

I also think 8' is a good length. I could not predict what will break down better unless I knew all the projects that would come from it. What I do know is that it is the height of most rooms, so you can cut anything you want that will fit vertically in most homes. It is long enough for most tables, benches (both kinds). What you really want in a large personal stack is the ability to get any max size you want out of it. Waste etc... is less of an issue.

Thanks Tom...

Barry Irby

I had the logs cut 8' 4" for several reasons. I have a small shop and if I had anything longer, I would have to take it outside to turn it around. I can't think of anything I would want to build that would require stock over 8'. I am set up to cut 8' stock down to length easily. Longer sometimes gives me problems.

The 4" on the ends accounts for splitting, ragged cuts, and snipe.

I had not thought of stair treads. In the distant past, I built well over a hundred houses. In those days stairs would have been a thing. Now that I think of it, I built a lot of them, including a spiral one the people still talk about.

I have a bandsaw that runs a 3" wide carbide tipped blade that will resaw 10". I think I'm good.

And you are right about another thing. The other day I brought home one 8/4 by 12" by 8' piece of the green oak and it was a tussle. At my age, it was not as light as it used to be. At 12' it might have won.

Re: Thanks Tom...

TomD

I wrote some of that post before I read you have x K of wood in stock already. And alreaday own saws you would need. Certainly not your first rodeo.

And "Bill", is always with a capital letter.

Re: Year per inch

TomD

True, you can't rely on it. But it gets you started. Most systems mention some way of checking for the result.

There is going to be a tremendous difference depending on the climate, and the species, and how much water was in it to start with. I have turned pieces where it felt like one was taking a shower, while most wet wood is soft to cut but does not shake like a dog coming out of the water.

When we arrived at the farm this year, several trees had fallen over, they were poplars, and one of them took down 2 red oaks. We got them sorted into fire wood. And due to the situation with watching over my mother's last days, we are still here, when normally we would be gone for 2 months. So we are burning wood, it was 24 deg F last night, and we tried burning the stuff that was cut this year. It is burning fine. I did not expect that, but spring and summer was hot, and the leaves were on the trees to pull the water out until we got to them. Still learning.

Year per inch is mostly worthless

John K Jordan

I cut up logs into lumber at my sawmill and at the shop bandsaw for woodturning blanks.

My experience after over 15 years of this is time to dry depends a great deal on the type of wood, the thickness, and the location, climate, and time of year. Some wood species such as sassafras and eastern red cedar dry very quickly outside in the summer in my part of the country. Some, such as osage orange, black locust, persimmon, dogwood, and white oak take much longer. Wood cut to 1/4" or less will usually dry in days.

I agree the "one year per inch" rule of thumb is mostly worthless. The "one year per inch plus one inch" rule of thumb is more likely to be close, but only for 4/4 lumber cut from species like cherry, yellow poplar, walnut, and soft maple, not so much for more dense species, especially those with pores full of tyloses such as osage orange and black locust. The time to EMC also depends on the width of the wood since moisture escapes from all six surfaces.

I personally saw 4/4 when I need barn siding and shelves and 8/4 to 20/4 when I want slabs to process into woodturning blanks. For these, I sticker or stand short boards vertically for a year or so, cut up into smaller turning blanks, then dry the blanks on wire shelves in a conditioned space.

A good moisture meter is a great and quick check but I use the more accurate method of weighing a sample: I put a piece of tape on certain representative sizes for each species "batch" and record the weight in grams. Periodically I reweigh the blank and record the new weight. When the weight quit changing the wood is dry. By association, I consider the entire batch of similar sized pieces dry.

To use this method with long boards from the sawmill simply sacrifice one and cut a piece out of the center or off the end, cutting back from the end of the log especially if the log has been sitting for a while. Seal the end grain of the sample(s) with Anchorseal to prevent false results from rapid drying through the ends.

Some 1x1 and 2x2 turning squares are air dried to EMC in just a few weeks or months. Thicker blanks take longer, some have take years.

The weight method is easy and accurate. To test acquired lumber without tracking the weighnt for months the "oven dry" method is the gold standard. It requires cutting samples out of the center of a typical board. https://www.fpl.fs.fed.us/documnts/fplgtr/fplgtr117.pdf

Once I used the oven dry method to test ebony blanks suspected to be wet but of unknown provenance. I found it to be well dried.

http://www.woodcentral.com/woodworking/forum/turning.pl/page/11/md/read/id/503549/sbj/moisture-content-by-oven-dry-method/

JKJ

Re: Year per inch is mostly worthless

paul in AZ

John: You talk about "my part of the country".

In order to make your comments more understandable it would be helpful if you told us where you live.

Re: Year per inch is mostly worthless

William Duffield

He's in the mountains of eastern Tennessee, as are John Lucas and Bill Tindall, and probably some other major contributors to the knowledge disseminated on Wood Central.

Every so often, I recommend here that we post our general locations in our profiles, but I get very little traction on this idea.

I'm in New Jersey, down on Delaware Bay, where it's raining cats and dogs today.

Re: Year per inch is mostly worthless

TomD

I live on the great lakes, and also on a great lake that is not in the great lakes. I always thought I would have trouble due to how humid it is, but I never seem to have any trouble. A drawer may stick, and I probably should not send my stuff to Arizona.

Of course the inch per year rule was never meant to be pedantically applied. It is transparently obvious there are a lot of variables. Guys who do this pro, are probably using a kiln, and may not know much about air drying. But I wonder how it averages out. If one was looking for a general rule across species and climate zones, time of year of harvest, or whatever, would be it be 2 inches per year, .5 inches per year. How off is it? If one is saying it is categorically wrong, without suggesting the alternative average that is not convincing either. There is an average condition for air drying in the US, that is probably different than Brazil, or Iceland. If you live on the coast, or in a dessert and you are working wood, you probably know what the offset is anyway.

location, etc.

John K Jordan

>>>John: You talk about "my part of the country".

In order to make your comments more understandable it would be helpful if you told us where you live.

Hi Paul. Click on my name in any message and my profile will come up with the location.

Many members here, but not all, use the profile for their location and/or a bit about themselves. I make a habit of looking at these, especially for for people I don't know well. I noticed your profile is empty. If a name is not blue to indicate a link to the profile, that person has no registered or has logged in with a name not identical with their registered name.

JKJ

Gov document on air drying lumber

John K Jordan

I don't know if it was mentioned in this thread, but there is a free gov publication that has enough information on air drying wood to explode your head! I have referred to it often. One useful page is a list of the EMC during the year of selected areas of the country.

This is the top of the cover page which should make it easy to find the PDF.

JKJ

Re: Hoarding wood. I'm in 20+ years and...

Grant Smith

This topic feels like it was written about me and my lovely wife. We have collected logs from several land owners who where happy to have help cleaning up a downed tree. We have obtained the right equipment for small scale or "micro" logging. Living in eastern Iowa, we have an abundance of the better species to choose from. cherry, walnut, maple, and the oaks. Our climate is such that air drying presents no issues, and we can treat the drying wood for insects if there is sign.

We purchased a small Kubota tractor 8 years ago second hand. It also also mows the lawn, moves snow, landscapes liftes, smooths, tills, and generally earns its keep by nearly paying for itself over the years. A tilt bed car trailer with a winch helps move larger logs along with a self made log arch. We don't feel like we have invested too much given the cost of quality lumber and the usefulness of the equipment we have now.

True, we net log run lumber as a result, so one can't count every board as a success. As others have said, a fire place is ready to consume what we don't find useable, and ugly lumber can make shelving, etc.. Experience and a good eye help limit the bad log issue these days. Target length of a log is between 8' and 10'. Bill is correct in the sense that longer boards yield more options if you have the space and the need for volume. We find that 8-10' is adequate for our small needs, however.

4/4, 6/4, 8/4, and 12/4 for big slabs are usually what we mill, with the lions share 4/4 and 12/4. We enjoy building unique tables, solid furniture and have built (2) 14' shuffle boards recently with great results. Easily half of what we build goes out the door to friends, family, and the occasional commissioned piece.

An incalculable factor is the satisfaction of taking a tree to furniture. The learning curve, pride, and permanence of doing so makes it worth while. The awe of fellow woodworkers who visit is also priceless. We share our knowledge to anyone who inquires, along with the odd board a colleague is in need of.

The cost of lumber from that first log was higher due to the startup costs associated. No argument there. Today, the equipment needed is paid for, and we need to stay fit anyway. Annually, a log or three is done for others who pay their share of the costs, if not more in terms of gratitude and comradery. If we end up with too much of a given species, we share or sell to those who can't forage for themselves.

We find commercial lumber boring. Demand has dictated homogenous boards by the truckloads. That's where the money is and demand for those building homes or commercial items. We have no argument there, as it fills the larger need. That said, we find that the eye candy of those unique figured, crotch figured, extra dark, wavy grain boards are our nirvana. Sharing rounds or thick slabs to our woodturner friends only adds to the joy we all find here.

We aren't ones to bean count, but we estimate about 3500 bft outside drying under sheet metal, and another 7,000 or so inside waiting for inspiration.

Not buying commercial lumber has enabled (and made necessary) our ability to upgrade our machinery to pro grade in most cases. This has created a benefit in the ability to plane to 15", joint to 8", and sand to 25". Here again, friends also benefit from our bounty.

Will we outlive the lumber? probably not, that is indeed the preference if you ask us. What is the alternative? $80 boards at the lumber yard?. Maybe we will want to build items to sell at the farmers market. Maybe it gets sold to budding woodworkers at our estate sale. Maybe a grand kid will learn the art of woodworking and find it their nirvana too.

None of this is what we would consider "making a mistake".

Regards,

Grant in Iowa

Great response Grant. Wish I lived closer...

Table values could be misleading

Bill Tindall, E.Tn.

We sold lumber for many years. Bundles came into our inventory from kiln at 7% MC. Upon storage MC would go up some but nothing like the data in this table indicates. There are two reasons why the difference in my experience vs this table. One, these are equilibrium values. It might take months to equilibrate to these values.

Second, data like these are typically, perhaps always, arrived at by drying from the "green" state. While data generated this way is relevant to home air drying it is not for estimating the equilibrium regain from a KD state. Loss of volatiles during KD process results in KD lumber achieving a lower MC at some given conditions of humidity than lumber dried from green state. It is for this reason that KD lumber is more stable than air dried lumber.

Re: Table values could be misleading

John K Jordan

I think your concerns are addressed in the document.