Free Wood & How to Dry It for Woodworking in a Small Shop

if you are working out of your garage in a small shop such as mine there's a reasons why you might want to start investigating harvesting and drying your own lumber I mean lumber mills they're kind of catering for the bigger shops the furniture makers the mill right shops so they carry not only species but dimensions that's more based towards them I don't need big eight-foot long boards or giant slabs to make the kind of stuff I sell and I like to kind of cater to native trees in my area it's kind of a marketing pitch and a lot of times that's just not the kind of stuff that's available plus dimensions I use and allow my stuff is much bigger than what a lumber mill is gonna sell because it takes a lot of skill to dry stuff above 12 and 16 quarter inches and a lot of times I like six and eight inch thick pieces of lumber plus it's cheaper this way I mean you save a lot of money most of this wood you see in my drying rack right now was pretty much free to me I just had to put a little labor into it so that's what we're gonna be discussing today how to turn free wood and there's something that's useful to you all it takes is a little bit of knowledge a little bit planning and a little bit of patience as most of y'all know I do art markets for the majority of my income and I do a lot of wood turning making bowls boxes vases that kind of stuff mirrors I also do some flat work like small boxes and cases basically I make stuff that's easy to pack up to take to art markets and it's not inconvenient for a customer to take it away a chair would be kind of cumbersome to walk around the art market with or to transport to it but I want you to think about this you're not gonna buy blanks like this from a lumber mill oh and if you could it would be outrageously expensive I mean this one right here I get the math earlier it represents over eleven board feet of wood at seven or eight dollars a board fee for this species that's kind of pricey and that would just kill all profit I could get from a lot of this material which is why I half to hers my own would in order to just be competitive and get the kind of stuff I'm me plus the fact that you look at how you bounce a grain on your lumber lumber mills what ya they will do a little bit of it but their main concern is getting quarter sawn riffs on plain sawn boards they are not worried about centering the grain inside of board they're not worried about the cathedrals and stuff like that so even just getting the kind of material that's going to make my product the best it could be means I'm not gonna find it at a lumber mill and if you're making a little boxes and stuff like right here I got a nice piece of spoke to pecan for most people lumber mills this is trash this would be on their burnt pile because it's modeled up and it might not be consistent for an entire board but I'm not concerned with the entire board I'm gonna probably make a nice little box top on this one and I'll use another piece of that same tree to make the sides part of that tree that wasn't as modeled so I might have an entire pecan box but I can't roll the looks of it and still keeping it natural without Eddie dies or anything like that plus the fact that I really can't say this is all local lumber I can tell people it was locally grown and locally made these are native species to my area of the country I can't say that one if I even if I go buy up a cardboard from my lover milk it might have come from Alabama or Oklahoma or something like that somewhere else not just this area and that kind of stuff is important to me because not only is it supporting my local economy but it's a great marketing pitch it allows me to build value I can actually tell people where this tree grew it grew on 4th Street down San Marcos or San Antonio Street in Austin and people have a sense of history and community it just builds value you just can't do that if you're buying from my lumber mill now I can already tell what kind of comments are going to be some typing in right now I can't there's no trees in my area I can't just go get free wood and I'm telling you trees fall down all the time hey you wanted free tree wait till after a storm that something's go fall down in the neighborhood just go say hey can I chop this up for you and take away the trunk sure leave it on the curb the city will get the rest of it or if you're friends with an arborist most of our births have a hard time getting rid of the trees the city dumps don't really want to take it where they charge them a lot of money if you're friends with the arbors they can tell you hey we're taking down the red maple next week if you want come and take the trunk and we'll just grind up the the canopy that would be a blessing to them and you can get some great material if you do that when I do suggest you return a bowl or something from that tree to that person architect go firms they are always clearing out Lots hey just get a heads up before you go ahead cup something down maybe I can go out and pick a tree to chop down and process up tell you up I'll return you three or four bowls for that you can get it to the property owner after the house is built as a housewarming gift that's a great way to do it Craigslist people are always having trees fall down in the backyard they put it in little notice come take it away the city's gonna charge me $600 to do it you can have it for free what I'm trying to say is if you're not too picky about the species you know I restrict myself to native hardwoods in my area you're gonna have access to lumber you just need to be able to jump when the opportunities to open up I mean most of human civilization did develop around treat areas some of y'all might be in desert hey y'all chose to live there but most of us have trees available and does of y'all that are in the desert hey people plant one of the miles and there are Gardens all the time their yards all the time those things die and if you have that take what you can get mentality you're gonna get the joy of being a work with a whole bunch of different species if you're just going to a lumber mill you're kind of restricted and a lot of people just guest up for the color on it for the dark colors cherries for the Reds maples for the light colors that kind of stuff but if you're working with whatever you find you get the privilege of working with mesquite pear apple pecan hat berry I even have some poplar in here a nice walnut you get both blacken and regular wall now in my area I mean just Chinaberry eye that was a kind of an interesting one to work with yeah I get boxelder in this area we don't have much maple here but boxelder is pretty close just a wide variety so that you can bring a lot more to your product and you can even mix them in with more traditional woods like the cherries which we do have one or two species down here in Texas now I did a video a while back on tree butchery where I showed you all the different parts of a tree that you could use in woodworking and you can use the entire tree but my preference become getting a lot of this stuff for free is I really only want about a two feet above the ground and up to the second branch and if that branch you really really big I might use that specifically for bowls but for nothing else and I prefer fairly trees that grew fairly straight up and down because for a lot of my work I do like the kind of plain wood I want to be able to balance a grain but I don't want a lot of imperfections in it knots way that kind of stuff I want my design to be the key feature and you can do that one with branch wood and stuff like that and if I'm wanting to decorate it I might specifically take that spot in the tree right there we're just going to have a lot of figure from that flame for the ligaments are holding the tree together and preventing from split apart that might be as fancy as I get if in balancing that in the bottom of a bowl but the type of trees in your area kind of dictate the tools you're gonna want to use as a woodturner I kind of think you need three main tools you need your lathe and all the stuff that goes with that one you also need a bandsaw those kind of go hand-in-hand and if you want to save money you to invest in a good chainsaw go ahead and get a pro chainsaw even if you're only going to use it for once or twice a month in the long term it will last you good long time and you'll be less frustrated with it nothing worse than going out and working for two three hours with your chainsaw and then having it sputter out on you die and you kind of waste the entire day especially if you drove 3-4 hours to get to a place you want something that's going to run all day long when you do need it and spending a few like 100 extra bucks to do that one is well worth it but the size of chainsaw you want is also kind of critical the chainsaw I use the most is just a 50 cc er and it has a 20 inch bar and that 20 inch bar is big enough to make it a little bit past the width of the largest of trees that I'm able to process and that's all I really need because my lathe can only turn a 16 inch bolt so if I can cut my blanks up and to cut across 20 inches but cut them down to about 20 inches so I have a little bit of waste on each end I can then split those into my bowl blanks with that same chainsaw I don't have to make multiple cuts now when I'm doing that one the general idea is if you have your log even in the lumber mill stuff you want to get rid of the pith cuz that's gonna be this part that starts the cracking that starts all the damage and frankly that's the worthless part of the wood so I will generally make two cuts right there trying to balance a grain is put best I can even once so if the pith is off-center I might adjust those cuts so that the grain will be balanced and then I will cut that pip out and that basically gives me two halves and then two blanks a lot of these sections I either turn into my shaker twenty-minute bows or they go up in the rack for it to dry for a few years for me to make boxes to forget does that's nice quarter sawn grain they're perfect stable great wood not the kind of stuff you're gonna find in a lumber mill very often especially in that thickness they do it why do I like that thickness because I can resaw that one and get all the grain going all the way around the box and make sure I get all the parts from the same spot in the same tree so the colors are gonna be the same again quality and from there it's all a matter of drying didn't think what controlling how the water comes out of that log so that the end product is something you can actually use now getting that water I drying it's just gonna take time but you as a person doing the drying you've got to control how that water is coming out of the wood because if it comes out too fast you're what's gonna be totally trashed and when I talk about this there are basically two kinds of water in wood and I'm going to dramatically oversimplify it if you want I'm gonna bring it down to the elementary level if you want a middle school level I'll put a link down below to a short PDF document from Oregon State University that's really really good but if you want even more I mean people go to college to learn all this kind of stuff and the guys that run the really good mills take it to the nth level we're talking elementary knowledge of what right I'm talking about right now and in wood you basically have two kinds of water you have what they call free water and bounded water the free water is a water that travels from the roots to the leaves up and down it comes down brings the nutrients take some nutrients up and it's running up and down those straws that we all use as an analogy to describe wood fibers it's not the water in the cells that water that's inside the cells as part of even the micro fiber a structure or within the snow itself that's kind of sealed in and there's even some chemical bonding at happening between the oxygen and hydrogen and the the elements in the cells themselves that really locks it in now the free water represents the majority of a tree's way in fact a standing tree is probably half it's weight is just water and what's really cool is if you've ever seen lumber mills or those old lumber movies they used to stack trees up like that teepee when they first cut them and below that you it was just flooding water out cuz the free water you'll come out with gravity it comes out actually pretty quickly within a week or two you can drop the weight of a tree by 25-30 percent as you get rid of that water in fact there's one time I I brought a tree in here and I didn't stand it on end I just kind of rolled it into the shop and when I came out the next day I really did think I've had a pipe burst or something like that cuz my entire shop had a thin layer of water it was just a water flowing out of that pecan but the problem is if that water flows out too fast then the water bound in these cells will want to evaporate out of those cells see the tree kind of forms a balance between the free water and the bound water and that's what keeps it at a certain moisture content that allows it to live that bound water controls all the cells the living parts and stuff like that and if there's no water on the outside it will slowly migrate out and if it migrates out too fast it's that something has to replace the vapor and water that was in that cell and that's what causes the shrinkage in wood it's the bound water not the free water you can have as much free water come out it's not gonna change the shape of the wood because basically that was just in the tubes the cells the straws that's not going to change its shape but as a water leaves those cells they do change and if you get the water leaving too fast from the end grain because all the air flow and the vapors are coming out here that's where your cracking starts so the first thing I do actually I process the tree almost that very same day is I will put something called anchor seal and you can use a paint or something like that but something to plug up those holes for the free water to block its exit I want that free water to stay in there I don't want to come out the tubes too fast I actually want it to come out of the face crane because it comes a lot slower and a lot easier and obviously the waters gonna come out of the outside of the wood quicker than the inside of the wood but it's slow enough that the difference between the moisture content from the outside to the dead center isn't so radical that it's gonna rip those cells apart as they change shape causing our cracks it's the same thing when I turn a bowl blank when I'm turning a rough bowl blank I basically turn it very even all the way around and I cooked all the end grain with that waxy material so that the moisture slows down how it's coming out so the bowl won't crack and we'll still warp I mean this one was done about three months ago and it is radically warped but it hasn't warped so quickly that is cracked on me and in case you're wondering I do have a couple videos on turning Bowl blanks once called the roughing life then I did another one of going from a tree to a bowl a finish Bowl in a single day but I talked about the drying process along the way now if you are wanting the wood the water teeth that break out of the face crane because we've got this plugged up on the end grain we have a problem look at that stack right there that is never going to dry because there's no air movement around there that's why Luverne mills will sticker the board's giving you at maybe a half inch or five a two inch gap so the air can flow over so the water can leave it if I were to leave these sitting right like this more than likely they would just mildew and rot because the water is gonna stay in there and water acting on dead wood rots it in drying the wood one of the reasons why I like my shelf is because I put all different shape stuff in there and when I stack it you notice I leave these angles these gaps because it's only touching on that point so air can move it around now this section right here was spread out all over my rack I just recently condensed it all so I could have some open shelves to put that boudoir in there which I'm should go show you a different way I do those in a second but when they were more spread out air can move around then geckos could get in there now even these larger half quarter rounds I would put them up like that and let them dry on my shelves most of this stuff right here has been on my shelf for two or three years now and it's ready for me to start making boxes and stuff out of but there's some items that you don't have to have a hundred percent dry bowls for instance do they really matter if they warp a little bit or how about these mounts I was talking about earlier boater is one of the hardest woods I know when it is completely dry but a mount like this doesn't have to be perfectly dry to be useful in fact this one that I've been using for I think three or four years now was bone green when I when I turned it I coat it in beeswax to control its drying a little bit and it's been perfectly fine for me it dented a little bit because it was still wet but once it dried fully rock hard these that I'm going to be producing for the mouse right there I want them to dry the majority of the way now this right here would take or the general thumb is start out with an inch start out with a year and a half and then for every inch add another year so that right there if I wanted this to air dry it would probably take five or six years for it to dry I want to reduce that I already know that it is going to be a cylinder so I'm going to turn these all round and by doing that one I leave less room less distance for the water to migrate out of the board dry out these corners add a lot of time but as long as I can get the outside the wood fairly dry enough so it's not denting these would be ready to rock and roll in six months to a year instead of those five or six years and that's something you can control of when you're drying your own lumber you can set the moisture content I do know a lot of chair makers they like to have a really wet seat that's still going to contract a little bit and really dry spindles that might even a little bit so when you seat the mortise-and-tenon socket something like a Windsor chair that seat will actually crank down on the spindle and really lock it all together you can't do that one if you're buying your lumber for our winter chair from a lumber mill so real quickly let me turn these down to five inch rounds and show you the advantage of storing them that way on something like your drying rack or underneath your workbench or just in the corner of your garage [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] now the first are processing that stack of lumber I had dedicated for mallets that represented about 200 board feet of lumber and I probably had another hundred board feet in that air in that from that tree of square stuff I don't really know what I'm going to do with it yet so I'm going to leave it square just kind of randomize it stacking order so that can get air movement but because I knew these were going to be cylinders doing it this way I mean you're only going to have two or three maybe four contact points the rest of it is spiced for air to move plus the fact that it doesn't have as far for the sitter of water to move out so it should dry a lot quicker in a round form than in a square form now I did say I want to start using this in four to six months I also have a way in my small shop to speed that up a little bit I have a small kiln that I made out of an old refrigerator that somebody was giving away cuz didn't work anymore cuz basically this is just a big icebox and I'll put a link down below to a video on how I did that one and it just uses a series of different wattage light bulbs to heat up this interior area and what happens is every six to three months I will take all this stuff out put it in my rack and let it act mate it because this is now really really dry and I want it to activate to my shops moisture I love it re back up I'll put the date right here and then that tells me every two three months swap that stuff out and you'd be surprised at how much lumber you can get processed through when I'm in the turbo turnin mode a lot of times I will turn the bowl I'll put it on my drying rack cuz you want that free water to get out of it before you put it in the kiln even the big lumber mills a lot of times they will air dry wood for a year or so before they kiln dry because children will really ramp up the temperature and get that stuff how they're really quickly and a lot of people don't like killing dried wood because they say it feels crunchy oh that's basically because the water inside the cells has expanded so rapidly that it's cracked those cells and then they dry out even more that's maintaining that cell structure is what gives it a silky smooth feel when you're working with it with hand tools plus it's Johnny a little bit weather anyways this kiln right here will allow me to work with wood a little bit quicker and once again all it is is light bulbs and I have a temperature gauge in back and I have this little thing right here that when I really want to ramp up the temperature high towards the end I'll kind of plug up this one exhaust port because air comes in on bottom and comes out through the top so allows me control and really in the summertime this thing will get probably 20 to 30 degrees higher than the outside temperature and sometimes in this shop it gets up to 105 110 so that gets me into the realm where real wood processors drive their wood at I mean it's actually pretty good for low low budget I think I want to say I spent 10 15 bucks on the little light bulb setup and just finding a broken freezer on Craigslist now I understand for most people woodworking isn't as serious as I'm taking right here a over purchase of material cost isn't going to destroy your monthly income because it is just a hobby but the advantages of being able to experiment with different species of wood that might not be available to you or using local resources or being able to save money on your materials so you can spend more money on your tools there are a lot of advantages to wanting to experimenting with drying your own lumber and you don't have to have a giant drying rack maybe just a corner under your bench or if you're a Turner huh hey maybe ruff turn your bowls right when you get them and stick them up in your attic your attic is pretty much a kiln I mean in the summertime it gets up way up there in temperature wise and it will vent all the moisture and stuff like that coming out of the wood it's great there I'll sit back you'll probably forget about it leave it up there for a few years I'll be bone dry whenever you do put it on the lathe and you can wait turn find find details or if you're a box maker hey somebody's cutting down a tree they're in your neighborhood they generally cut up the rounds in two sizes that you can pick up and put in the back of the truck so I asked them hey can I grab a few pieces if you don't have a bandsaw you can actually just use splitting wedges to divide it up into sections and then store that in your attic or under your bench I mean that's actually how chair makers like Peter fallens begettal other styles and stuff like that for their chairs they just let them sit around their shop for six months to a year and then they're ready to use drying wood is a another niche of this crap that even if you get the most rudimentary skills on it you know cut it seal the ends let it dry for six months or so then stick it in a refrigerator kiln for another two to three months and jack up that temperature so that it's ready to rock and roll the thicker it is the longer it's gonna take to dry the slower you need to slow down that evaporation process within the wood so it doesn't crack I mean just very very basic rules can open up your world to a lot more opportunities if you enjoyed this video please do me a favor life favor subscribe do all those social medias tell your friends hey maybe go to my website a lot of the woodwork I've been talking about right now will be available for sale on that website and in six months a year maybe you will see some of those mouths pop back up and look down below in the description because I will leave links to a lot of the videos I've kind of referenced in this including how I built that rack right they're really inexpensive really strong you know wants you to remember one last thing that it is always worth the effort to learn great stuff and share with others y'all be safe and have fun

Channel: wortheffort

Views: 306,604

Rating: 4.9258628 out of 5

Keywords: wortheffort, wood, lumber, timber, board, blank, dry, drying, kiln, air, woodworking, wood working, craft, diy, shop, small, garage, basement, attic, turning, hand, tool, shelf, shelves, mill, process, green, tree, chainsaw, band saw, bandsaw, lathe

Id: nc1SmIlLQh8

Length: 28min 29sec (1709 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 18 2019