Thicknessing
Welcome! / Forums / General Woodworking Discussions / Wood and Wood Preparation / Thicknessing
Tagged: Seasoning of Small Oak Logs
- This topic has 3 replies, 3 voices, and was last updated 7 years, 12 months ago by
Anthony Greitzer.
-
AuthorPosts
-
8 October 2015 at 2:12 pm #131156
This past August I was able to acquire free oak from a neighbor. I’ve never sawn or split small logs before, so I used an axe and log saw to halve them. I’ve also never seasoned wood before so I’m letting the halves dry in my garage. My garage is not insulated nor heated. I live in the USA in Pennsylvania, where January and February months sometimes reach minus two degrees. In the summer, like August, temps sometimes reach 100 degrees. In my garage, I’m sure the temp is probably 105 or close to 110 degrees. I’m sure the changes in these temperatures will cause the log halves to badly check and crack and therefore make them useless. My only solution as of now is to saw the logs and plane them to one and half inches thick. Once I get all the log halves to this thickness, will they properly dry when I want to plane them to final thickess? I’m asking because I was anxious to see how well one of the smaller logs would plane and the wood feels slighty wet. The plane works fine but I’m concerned that the wood will still be wet in a couple years when I try to plane it down to 3/4 of an inch or 1/2 an inch.
8 October 2015 at 5:16 pm #131158IIRC, the rule of thumb for air drying is 1 year per inch of thickness.
The other thing you’ll want to do is to coat the end grain with wax or paint. This will help prevent a lot of the checking cause by the end grain drying faster than the long grain.
8 October 2015 at 5:53 pm #131159Like Pete said.
Also, if you do rough saw them to board size (I’d just saw them to rough size, don’t bother with planing them wet as they’ll get rough as they dry), be sure to sticker them in stacks so they get air on all sides, and put some weight on top like a couple cinder blocks or something. The weight will help keep them from getting too bent out of shape as they dry out. Flip the boards once a month or so, too.
Depending on how small these logs are, you may be better off just leaving them as squared logs. If the wood is still sopping wet and freshly cut from the tree, the boards are going to move a lot as they dry.
-
AuthorPosts
- You must be logged in to reply to this topic.