Wood storing/seasoning

[Greedo]

I'm looking for some advive.

I have been pottering about making things in my garage which has no heating whatsoever. When I make something at the moment I go and buy timber and work from it withing a day or 2. I'm going to semi retire soon and take on more of a non executive role in my company and am looking to therefore take things more serious in woodworking. I'm going to build a workshop in my garden. Nothing fancy or huge as i only like using hand tools. I won't have any machines. The workshop will have underfloor heating though. So the questions I have are.

1. Is it better to buy wood in bulk from the timber yard and store at home or still buy as and when. The reason I say as bulk is I can hire a van for a day and do a run to the timber yard which is an hour away and stock up every 6 months/year etc....

2. If I buy in bulk is it better to store the wood in the garage I currently use, which has no heating and bring it into the new workshop a couple of days prior as and when required

3. or is it best to have the wood in the new workshop from purchase which is going to have underfloor heating and a pretty much constant temprature all year round or will that dry the wood to a crisp and become too dry and twisted?

Your help and advive and experience would be much appreciated as if it's option 3 then the new workshop may need to be bigger.

 

[kevinlightfoot]

I think option three is the way to go,buying timber from good timber merchants should ensure your purchases are well killed hence the moisture content is usually between 12 and 8 percent.The main problems storing timber arise from fluctuations in relative humidity if you are storing in a well ventilated well heated environment with little fluctuations in those conditions then I doubt the moisture content of kiln dried timber will fall much below 8 percent.This I would consider to be the ideal moisture content for building most things for indoor use.Of course due consideration is needed when actually building to take into account any wood movement when your work leaves your workshop.In any case build your workshop as large as your land and your pocket can afford.Hope this helps best regards Kevin.

 

[kevinlightfoot]

Sorry I didn't mean your timber should be well "killed"but well kilned.I hate computers!

 

[woodbloke66]

Depends whether you go for green/wet timber which will need to be thoroughly dried, normal air dried timber, or kilned.
I bought some green planks of English oak and London Plane last August which were off the scale on my moisture meter when I started to air dry them. I tested them again this morning and in around four months, they're currently sitting at around 23% MC or moisture content, which still too high. If you're air drying, reckon on a year for every 25mm of thickness in a well ventilated stack under cover (to keep off the hot sun) to drop a board to 20%MC.
Were you to purchase air dried timber from a reputable yard, it ought to be at around 20% MC and will need further conditioning in a warmish room or workshop until the MC drops to around 10% or so, when it's safe to use it for furniture making.
There's a lot of kilned stuff around, but the danger, particularly with oak, is that it's been over kilned too quickly. The timber is then ghastly to work with and appears to have all all the 'life' sucked out of it; it's almost impossible to plane by hand and is even awkward to stuff through a p/t. It may also be full of splits and cracks that you won't be able to see when you buy it!
My preference is for air dried timber and the longer it's been drying, the better it will be. It's possible to buy good quality air and kiln dried timber; Yandles in Somerset mark their boards as a/d or k/d and I've never yet had a badly kilned piece of Euro Oak from them - Rob

 

[Greedo]

Sorry I didn't mean your timber should be well "killed"but well kilned.I hate computers!

I liked killed better ha ha ha

 

[Greedo]

Depends whether you go for green/wet timber which will need to be thoroughly dried, normal air dried timber, or kilned.
I bought some green planks of English oak and London Plane last August which were off the scale on my moisture meter when I started to air dry them. I tested them again this morning and in around four months, they're currently sitting at around 23% MC or moisture content, which still too high. If you're air drying, reckon on a year for every 25mm of thickness in a well ventilated stack under cover (to keep off the hot sun) to drop a board to 20%MC.
Were you to purchase air dried timber from a reputable yard, it ought to be at around 20% MC and will need further conditioning in a warmish room or workshop until the MC drops to around 10% or so, when it's safe to use it for furniture making.
There's a lot of kilned stuff around, but the danger, particularly with oak, is that it's been over kilned too quickly. The timber is then ghastly to work with and appears to have all all the 'life' sucked out of it; it's almost impossible to plane by hand and is even awkward to stuff through a p/t. It may also be full of splits and cracks that you won't be able to see when you buy it!
My preference is for air dried timber and the longer it's been drying, the better it will be. It's possible to buy good quality air and kiln dried timber; Yandles in Somerset mark their boards as a/d or k/d and I've never yet had a badly kilned piece of Euro Oak from them - Rob

No green timer. just from what i have been told on here is a good place and that is Duffields in Yorkshire.

 

[custard]

Interesting question, here are a few things to consider,

-I'd recommend almost every woodworker should try and work with as limited range of hardwoods as possible, for beginning furniture makers that might mean just two or three species. That way you can build up a stock of timbers in different thicknesses and in different cuts (quarter sawn versus flat sawn, etc), plus you can carry unused timber over to your next project. Consequently I'm instinctively drawn to your idea of buying in bulk, go to the right yard and that would give you timber that's all from the same tree for maximum colour and grain consistency.

-Storing hardwood and storing sheet goods are two completely different things. I store sheet goods in my main heated workshop, I store hardwoods in unheated, lock-up garages. But don't take my word for it, the Barnsley workshop also stores sheet goods in a special temperature controlled room, but they'll often store hardwoods in these actual open sheds,

From here the timber will be brought into the workshop a couple of weeks before it's needed, the craftsman or woman will spend a good few hours considering which piece of timber will be used for which component, and then it's rough cut according to the cutting list and left in stick by his or her bench. This system is tried and tested for making ultra precision furniture that might sell for tens of thousands of pounds,

-Not all components need the same treatment. Certain components, like drawer sides, are notorious for requiring meticulous processing to achieve maximum stability in service. That might mean bringing inside the rough sawn stock a month or two before it's required, picking only straight grained/quarter sawn stock with no hint of wind, then machining it down slowly in several stages, carefully removing timber equally from the two faces. Other components won't require anything like this degree of care.

 

[Greedo]

Cheers Custard.

What does "left in stick" mean? Do you mean rough cutting and planing it 62x62x62 and leaving it for a few day when you want the final piece to be 60x60x60 for arguments sake?

Also I won't have a single machine. I'm not intrested in speed or ease. I want to challenge myself and work solely with my hands so will be dimensioning everything by hand.

 

[custard]

"In stick" is when you store timber separated by wood sticks, say about 15mm x 15mm in cross section. The purpose is to allow air to circulate entirely around the wood, preventing it becoming drier on one side than another. You can place both rough sawn boards as well as finished components in stick. In my workshop once I've selected the boards for a project it's in stick right through to final assembly.

When I trained as a cabinet maker we spent the first seven or eight months working exclusively with hand tools, dimensioning hard wood boards with hand saw and bench plane.

Most modern accounts of hand dimensioning with bench planes read a bit weird to my ear. They generally suggest planing one face flat, then using this as the reference surface to mark the final thickness from, and then plane the opposite face right down to the scribe lines.

But you'll almost never see this procedure in real life, because it invites the board to warp and/or it takes way too long. Instead you'll either plane one face flat then plane the opposite face smooth, not caring very much what actual thickness it is or if it's all that co-planar. Take a look at antique furniture from before the industrial age, by and large you'll see the inside faces are flat and were used as the reference faces, but the outside, show faces are smooth yet aren't necessarily co-planar with the inside faces and will often vary in thickness. This is a completely different way of working to modern machine based cabinet making, but it's extremely efficient for the hand woodworker.

The second alternative is for when you need to hit a precise thickness, which is far less common than you might think. Then you plane one face approximately flat, plane the opposite face approximately flat and approximately co-planar, swing back to the first face and knock off another 1/16", then back to the second face and knock off another 1/16". You progress down, planing alternating faces, possibly over several weeks if you need maximum stability, until you're within 1/16" of final thickness, then you'll plane the reference face dead flat and finally bring the opposite face down to be co-planar, dead flat, and at final thickness.

 

[woodbloke66]

Depends whether you go for green/wet timber which will need to be thoroughly dried, normal air dried timber, or kilned.
I bought some green planks of English oak and London Plane last August which were off the scale on my moisture meter when I started to air dry them. I tested them again this morning and in around four months, they're currently sitting at around 23% MC or moisture content, which still too high. If you're air drying, reckon on a year for every 25mm of thickness in a well ventilated stack under cover (to keep off the hot sun) to drop a board to 20%MC.
Were you to purchase air dried timber from a reputable yard, it ought to be at around 20% MC and will need further conditioning in a warmish room or workshop until the MC drops to around 10% or so, when it's safe to use it for furniture making.
There's a lot of kilned stuff around, but the danger, particularly with oak, is that it's been over kilned too quickly. The timber is then ghastly to work with and appears to have all all the 'life' sucked out of it; it's almost impossible to plane by hand and is even awkward to stuff through a p/t. It may also be full of splits and cracks that you won't be able to see when you buy it!
My preference is for air dried timber and the longer it's been drying, the better it will be. It's possible to buy good quality air and kiln dried timber; Yandles in Somerset mark their boards as a/d or k/d and I've never yet had a badly kilned piece of Euro Oak from them - Rob

No green timer. just from what i have been told on here is a good place and that is Duffields in Yorkshire.

I bought this lot as newly converted and it was very wet and very, very heavy! Much better to buy properly air or kiln dried stuff but do beware, as I mentioned earlier, about buying kiln dried oak. It may look fine, but might hide within all sorts of defects that make it only fit for burning. Several friends of mine have fallen foul of this problem; one recently who bought what he thought was a prime selection of quarter sawn boards from Tyler's near Andover only to find them worse than useless.
Custard has provided an excellent account of the correct way to store and use timber, but the Barnsley pics shown appear to show new sheds or at least in a new location? When I saw the originals a few years ago, they were perilously close to dropping off a vertical land slip...

...which can just be seen at the back of this shed where the two planks are lying on the ground - Rob

 

[Chris152]

Storing hardwood and storing sheet goods are two completely different things. I store sheet goods in my main heated workshop, I store hardwoods in unheated, lock-up garages. But don't take my word for it, the Barnsley workshop also stores sheet goods in a special temperature controlled room, but they'll often store hardwoods in these actual open sheds,


From here the timber will be brought into the workshop a couple of weeks before it's needed

Is this the same for both kiln- and air-dried wood, custard? I'd figured that air-dried (say, 18% moisture content) comes indoors much sooner than kiln dried to reach a desired moisture content/ stop moving; and that if you leave kiln-dried exposed to outdoors air for long it'll start to absorb moisture, move, then have to come back inside for final acclimatisation.

 

[custard]

Kiln dried timber is taken down to a lower moisture content than air dried timber will ever realistically achieve. Consequently kilned timber undergoes permanent changes at the cellular level which rarely happens with air drying.

These changes prevent it from ever again taking up as much moisture as air dried timber, the cell walls can no longer expand and soak up as much moisture as air dried. This means the seasonal changes in kilned timber may well be smaller than for air dried. Does this make kilned timber more stable? Potentially yes, but that also depends on the quality of kilning. As a previous poster mentioned, much kilning is rushed through in order to drive down costs, even though badly kilned timber isn't great stuff to work with.

Is air dried timber better to work? Well, I'd rather have air dried than badly kilned timber that's for sure. But if you're talking properly processed samples of kilned versus air dried, then for most timber species I'm convinced there really isn't all that much difference. I have stood at a bench with a group of extremely experienced cabinet makers, and they struggled to correctly identify kilned Oak versus air dried Oak. When people know in advance which is which then they'll feed back their prejudices, but when it's a genuinely "blind" test the answers start looking more random!

The other thing to bear in mind is that the difference between air dried and kilned is becoming increasingly academic, more and more timber yards (and certainly the yards most likely to be used by hobbyists) only stock kilned timber.

 

[custard]

Barnsley pics shown appear to show new sheds or at least in a new location?

Very well spotted! They were moved and rebuilt across the lane about two or three years ago.

 

[Greedo]

"In stick" is when you store timber separated by wood sticks, say about 15mm x 15mm in cross section. The purpose is to allow air to circulate entirely around the wood, preventing it becoming drier on one side than another. You can place both rough sawn boards as well as finished components in stick. In my workshop once I've selected the boards for a project it's in stick right through to final assembly.

When I trained as a cabinet maker we spent the first seven or eight months working exclusively with hand tools, dimensioning hard wood boards with hand saw and bench plane.

Most modern accounts of hand dimensioning with bench planes read a bit weird to my ear. They generally suggest planing one face flat, then using this as the reference surface to mark the final thickness from, and then plane the opposite face right down to the scribe lines.

But you'll almost never see this procedure in real life, because it invites the board to warp and/or it takes way too long. Instead you'll either plane one face flat then plane the opposite face smooth, not caring very much what actual thickness it is or if it's all that co-planar. Take a look at antique furniture from before the industrial age, by and large you'll see the inside faces are flat and were used as the reference faces, but the outside, show faces are smooth yet aren't necessarily co-planar with the inside faces and will often vary in thickness. This is a completely different way of working to modern machine based cabinet making, but it's extremely efficient for the hand woodworker.

The second alternative is for when you need to hit a precise thickness, which is far less common than you might think. Then you plane one face approximately flat, plane the opposite face approximately flat and approximately co-planar, swing back to the first face and knock off another 1/16", then back to the second face and knock off another 1/16". You progress down, planing alternating faces, possibly over several weeks if you need maximum stability, until you're within 1/16" of final thickness, then you'll plane the reference face dead flat and finally bring the opposite face down to be co-planar, dead flat, and at final thickness.

Cheers for that. All great information. Apologies for the late reply as I was out last night and only logged on there. One quick point though. The modern method you talk about where the face is planed to flat and then the final thickness is scribed off this and then planed down to the scribe lines. Is that not the same as 99% of what people do in machine shops? Put the wood through the planer to get flat face then take over to the thicknesser and take do to the final dimension?

Plus the way you describe by flipping the board over over several weeks. Regardless of time would this not possibly create a potential wedge shaped board? IE both surface flat and true but when looking at the board from the edge then one side thinner than the other. Hope you know what I mean ha ha.

 

[custard]

Is that not the same as 99% of what people do in machine shops? Put the wood through the planer to get flat face then take over to the thicknesser and take do to the final dimension?

Plus the way you describe by flipping the board over over several weeks. Regardless of time would this not possibly create a potential wedge shaped board? IE both surface flat and true but when looking at the board from the edge then one side thinner than the other. Hope you know what I mean ha ha.

If the machinist is a careful worker and knows what they're doing they'll flip the board over after each pass, that way they work down to the final dimension in stages and removing equal amounts of timber from each side. That at least is the convention in furniture making, there are joinery workshops with monster thicknessing machines where they'll routinely take off 6mm or more of Oak at a single pass!

Regarding planing a wedge, you check the rough dimensions each time you work a face and compensate accordingly. You're not working to "dead flat" accuracy during these interim operations, but you do still apply a modicum of care.

 

[woodbloke66]

Is air dried timber better to work? Well, I'd rather have air dried than badly kilned timber that's for sure. But if you're talking properly processed samples of kilned versus air dried, then for most timber species I'm convinced there really isn't all that much difference. I have stood at a bench with a group of extremely experienced cabinet makers, and they struggled to correctly identify kilned Oak versus air dried Oak.

Agreed, but if by chance you get hold of a bad bit of kiln dried oak, you'll know instantly! For the most part, decently kilned Euro Oak (which is what I tend to buy) is quite good stuff to use. Some years ago I made my brother a fairly straight forward little box...

...as a Christmas present, except that it was a nightmare! It was impossible to hand plane and the only way it could be beaten into submission was by scraping and then working down through the grits, starting at about 80 or 100g if I recollect. I've used some rubbish timber since then, but never anything quite so appalling - Rob

 

[Greedo]

Is that not the same as 99% of what people do in machine shops? Put the wood through the planer to get flat face then take over to the thicknesser and take do to the final dimension?

Plus the way you describe by flipping the board over over several weeks. Regardless of time would this not possibly create a potential wedge shaped board? IE both surface flat and true but when looking at the board from the edge then one side thinner than the other. Hope you know what I mean ha ha.

If the machinist is a careful worker and knows what they're doing they'll flip the board over after each pass, that way they work down to the final dimension in stages and removing equal amounts of timber from each side. That at least is the convention in furniture making, there are joinery workshops with monster thicknessing machines where they'll routinely take off 6mm or more of Oak at a single pass!

Regarding planing a wedge, you check the rough dimensions each time you work a face and compensate accordingly. You're not working to "dead flat" accuracy during these interim operations, but you do still apply a modicum of care.

Right. I get it.

So, the thinking beind what you say is. For arguments sake you have 60mm board. You want to take it to 50 so you stick it through the planer to get a flat face. You then run it through the thicknesser and take it down to 57, then flip it over and take it to 56, then flip it over and take it to 55 and so on.

What is the benefit of that over just taking the board and putting it through the planer and getting a flat face and then putting it through the thicknesser and taking off 7mm in 2 passes on the same side?

I'm not questioning you or being pedantic by the way. Just trying to learn as much as I can.

 

[Sgian Dubh]

What is the benefit of that over just taking the board and putting it through the planer and getting a flat face and then putting it through the thicknesser and taking off 7mm in 2 passes on the same side?

It's to keep any stress within the wood in balance. Not all seasoned wood has stress, but some has, and when stressed it's usually approximately centred on and mirrored across the board's thickness, and sometimes the width. So taking equal amounts of both faces helps to keep that balance mentioned in the first sentence.

However, that really only applies to minor stress. Significantly stressed wood, whether natural, or artificially induced through poor seasoning, such as case-hardening or the much rarer reverse case-hardening is a very different matter with the wood generally being unusable for anything where trueness after squaring up matters. Slainte.