[carver6]

How do you determine when a piece of wood has been allowed to dry suffciently? I've always purchased my carving material from a local supplier in the form of cut and dried lumber. I have some Black Walnut trees and other types on our property but have never used any of them. Have read all the different ways to prepare wood for carving, just haven't seen any info about when to get my carving knife out. Many thanks for your help!!!

[Mike-in-WV]

You can buy meters that read the moister in the wood but a good one is not cheap. The time it takes for wood to dry depends on the type of wood, when it was cut, moister content or lack of it in the air, and temperature as well as moving or still air .
If you live in a place with low humidity and a warm climate you got it made. If you live like I do in the cold damp mountains with fog, rain, sleet, snow and very high humidity you need an inside spot. If you have a place where you can lay the wood up with a de-humidifier (spelling?) a fan and some heat you have a good chance of drying the wood sooner.
The way I test the wood is to use a knife and start triming the edges(carving) of the top or bottom of my staffs. If the wood is dry and hard all the way through it's ready. If you leave the staffs long enough when you cut them you can saw through the end and see and feel just how dry it is.
I really like to use a spot where the wood can lay in the shade with a good brez blowing and high temps.
There is half crawl space under my house that's heated with a cold air return and I can dry staffs fairly fast this time of year without it checking or cracking
in a short time. Hope this helps and that you have a great new year! Mike

[carver6]

Mike,
Thanks for the info. Guess I'm going to try using some of the various types of wood I have available. Appreciate the reply. Hope you have a super New Year with the best to you and yours.

[Mike-in-WV]

Same to you and yours Carver. Let us know how the carving goes . Mike

[AlArchie]

If you are planning on using the wood for carving, other than staffs, here's what I do......may not work for everyone but it does for me. First rough cut the log into the aproximate size you want, plus 10 to 20% for checking and shrinking. Try to split along the center of the log to relieve as much drying stress as possible. Quartered is better, and if you can, remove the very center . Then seal the ends with paraffin, melted and brushed on heavily. Now the FUN part......set that stuff aside in a dry well ventilated spot for one year for each inch of thickness! Nothing much more stimulating than watching lumber dry....except maybe watching grass grow.

You can also find charts for determining the dry weight of different woods, so you can weigh the chunk when you start and then weigh it occasionally until the correct dry weight is achieved. I've never used this method, but have seen the charts somewhere....maybe a Google search would turn them up. If you can't find anything there, try the USFS wood lab in Madison, Wisc. They have been helpful when I had questions regarding most anything about wood products. They'll mail you information both email and USPS.

Al

[Plain_Ol_Ed]

Build a bigger wood shed, MUCH bigger. You'll outgrow whatever you have now. I started with an 8 X 10 and am upgrading to a 10 X 16 and will probably have it outgrown by the time I get it built. Unless I hire somebody to build it.

[woodknomb]

I heard using your rafters in the basement works good too and the attic is another one.

[Ky_Whittler]

Fella's, there has to be some way of solving this little problem we all have. It is dificult to get the woods we want in the sizes we want unless we do them ourrselves. WHen we do that we wind up waiting for ever until the wood air cures in the limited space we have to store it. There has to be a better way!

During the winter I bring fresh sticks in the house to stand behind the woodstove for fast curring. I can have them in weeks as opposed to the months it takes out in the rafters of the hen house where I store sticks. I am in efect kiln drying these sticks by the stove.

I have looked up types of kilns I can find on the net and elsewhere. There has to be a way we can build a small kiln we can use at anytime of year. It would save a lot of storage space and time. But there are no articles for small working kilns.

I'm thinking that a box the size of a gun cabinet with light bulbs , protected by hardware cloth would do the job. Any other ideas? Whittler

[Plain_Ol_Ed]

The only problem is the fast you dry wood the more it checks.

An old bowyers trick is to put the stave in the back window of a car and leave it parked in the sun. I've never tried it because I have visions of driving the car and having to stop quick.

[Mike-in-WV]

KY-Whittler, Back when I was building my own self bows out of Hickory and Osage we used a drying box. It was 18"w x 2'h x 6'L. It was insulated with tin foil and had a full length lid on it. In the lid was mounted porcelan light sockets. We had 3 150W bulbs in them that was hooked and controled by a reostat switch. Also on one end of the box was a small vent and on the other end was a computor fan to circulate the heat.Also kept an over thermomiter in there to keep tabs on the heat.
Just turning on the switch would give you a temp of about 75 in just a short time. Let it dry for 24 hours at that temp and then bump it up to 90 and let it dry another 24 hours and so on. You can get the heat up to 150. Then I would slowly turn the heat back down over the next 24 hours and then after turning it off let sit over night before removing it from the "oven" It worked great and I never did crack any wood but I did over dry a few, Mike