The Stack: episode 1 - air drying lumber

hello youtubers welcome to the first episode of the stack this series is going to be dealing with air drying wood there's a air drying wood is kind of a science unto itself so I broke this whole series up into a series of videos so that I mean it's just too much material to cover in one video and I seriously doubt anybody wants to sit through a 20 hour video so anyway I broke it up into several sections and here's a list of the topics that we'll be covering in today's episode we're going to be looking at a proper stack construction the thickness of stickers the distance between them orientation of the boards in the stack that can be quite an important little feature even though it gets overlooked and then also the orientation of the stack to the prevailing winds and a few other little pointers that might be helpful for you folks out there that are looking to dry some of your own wood in case you've had it's on somewhere and want to do it yourself so sit back and hopefully you get something out of this first subject we're going to tackle here right now is the structure of wood you have two basic types of wood you have ring porous and then diffuse porous woods and ring porous are generally your your hardwoods like oak and ash that sort of thing and then you have diffuse porous woods such as say maple or in your in your soft woods like your your coniferous woods like spruce large etc those are considered diffuse porous woods and let's go mobile here and or better yet I'll just put in a picture of the two types of wood or from from the end grain perspective so that you can get a better idea of how the the ring structure where the the pore structure of the wood is set up you so now you've seen the ring porous and diffuse porous woods at least kind of a you know a flyover kind of kind of aspect of it ring porous woods have a tendency to dry out a little quicker at least from the ends then diffuse porous woods do and this is important because the cracking that sometimes will develop or the end checks that develop in the end of the board because the wood is gone or the moisture has escaped at the end of the wood a lot faster than it has in the core of it it kind of steps over into the realm of fiber saturation well let me first define fiber saturation it's the moisture content at which the wood starts to deform alrighty well there's a couple of directions that wood shrinks and on account of this cross-section here in this Tamarac log I'll show you how it works there's three main directions that the wood will shrink one is in the length and that's generally a maximum of two to three percent then it also shrinks radially like this and that's can be up towards of seven to eight percent and then can gently so this kind of movement with the Rings and that can be up to twelve percent 15 percent and it just depends on the species of wood when you're stacking you would you want to make it smile and the reason being for it is you know you noticed how the thicker the growth rings are a little denser in the old-growth part of it and so the water has a hard time penetrating that layer and if you stack the wood like this the wood can escape a whole lot easier and this is through capillary action in the boards as the wood as the air passes through this passes through the layers it will pick up the moisture and carry it off a little easier if it's stacked upside down the wood or the moisture can escape quite as readily it still will eventually escape but there's been enough studies on it to show that the board stacked in this fashion dry on average quite a bit faster than they do the other way around how far do I need to have it off the ground in this stack you can see this isn't this one's just set here temporarily so it's not going to be permanent but you definitely want to get your wood up off the ground preferably 12 to 16 inches if you're forced to stack outside you know you got to get it up off the ground and main reason for that is as rain falls you get water splashing up and then of course that water picks up dirt and then you got dirt on your on your wood okay to give you an idea of how much distance you need to have your stack up off the ground this is kind of a good idea about knee height so about 16 inches roughly you can see the pier blocks that these are these stacks are sitting on and then of course the cross members and these cross members also coincide with the rows of stickers as they go up through the stack and that's important for weight distribution so that you know everything is nice and level the other thing you have to look out for is when you set up your stack is that you have a nice nice level plane so that you don't have a slope in there or if you have a slope if you can't avoid stacking on a slope just make sure you don't have a bend going in there to it so that you're you're making that bend in the wood permanent so keep it as flat as you can and straight you know like a simple string like a string you know to stretch out a string to make sure that you've got a nice straight line so onto stack width what would be the optimal stack with well it's hard to really say what the optimum is when you consider that you know this stack here for example is about five feet wide and off about five feet tall roughly there not quite five feet tall it just depends on what you how fast you want to draw your wood if you want it to dry out relatively quickly of course anybody would want to you want to keep your stack as narrow as you can and then as stable as you can by not going up too high now of course most of you they're just going to have maybe you know a few boards so you're really not too concerned with the height but for those of you who do have a lot of wood you know three to four feet in width and three to four feet in height is about as big as you really want to go and the height is mainly a thing if you have to move the wood mechanically we know with a forklift or something like that so that's that's the the thing on height now you can see here in the middle there's gaps in between the boards and this is to allow vertical movement of the air through the stack as well and for air drying it is important it is an aspect that you should keep in mind that any air movement vertically and horizontally through the stack is important it's again is to carry off the moisture all right with distance between stickers now is it critical yes in a way it is your hardwoods have a shorter fiber structure which means they're more susceptible to deformation as the distance between the stickers is increase so with say for instance this oak here for example you've got a sticker distance of a little under two feet and in softer woods you can go a little more you can go up to I'll say three feet at a maximum optimum is about two feet if you keep the same distance for all your wood it's kind of a mocks next situation about two you know one and a half to two feet is is a good distance to keep between all your woods so another stacking your wood is getting the stickers just aligned perfectly so that when pressure is exerted on the stack that you don't get any deformation following pictures here highlight that pretty good you now stickers are of course an important aspect or an important part of your stack so rule of thumb is that you want it about a thumbs thick so your sticker should be at least a 3/4 of an inch thick you can go a little thicker if you like but anything over an inch and a quarter you're not really getting anything as far as their movement is concerned so if you have a sticker that's 3/4 of an inch ie 19 millimeters by say 30 millimeters wide that's plenty this sticker here is 27 by 20 we know that rough sawn lumber surface is not exactly real aerodynamic and so the air passing through the stack will meet quite a bit of resistance so in order to counter that you have to make your sticker thick enough to where you can get plenty of air movement through it without creating too much turbulence and slowing the air movement down as it passes through the through the layers of the stack but it adds for your for you guys at home you know 3/4 to 1 inch thick inch to inch and a quarter wide is about an optimum size for your sticker now again spacing is of course important and then of course the vertical alignment within the stack so that your that your lumber doesn't deform because green lumber is more flexible and pliable and if you start putting pressure on it in out of alignment it will maintain that form once it's dried it's kind of like steaming wood you know if you want to compare it to that so that's the reason you want to keep your sticker nice and perpendicular or nice and vertical in the stack and then another aspect is to your sticker should be out of material that doesn't stain so that could be a lot of different kind of material preferably ideally actually would be to have it out of the same material that your lumber is that you're stacking so if you're stacking say Tamarac your stickers ought to be out of that same kind of wood preferably clean without any kind of stain in them now if you're stacking really since color sensitive woods and we'll get into that topic on another video it's called color retention you saw that in the intro as one of the topics you're going to have to use a sticker that doesn't absorb fungi and other stains or stickers that don't have any tans in them because some woods react quite sensitively to staining and so forth and you'll have an imprint but again that's a subject for a different video altogether but ideally your sticker should be out of a material like spruce or doug-fir wood that doesn't accept or the heartwood I should say that doesn't accept readily accept to stain now if you keep you with your stickers out of the weather that's important they generally don't stain and you know keep them clean too that is another important aspect keep them dry and keep them clean and keep them out of the weather so that they don't pick up any adverse moisture or stains dirt a lot of this plays a role now some of your probably thinking should I make a square sticker and I've seen outfits to do that the problem is with square stickers the dimensions aren't always true and so when the sticker rotates if it's an eighth diminish thicker on one side you really can't see it at a flash unless you got really good eyesight and so you're going to end up with either a crushed sticker or you know a warp in the board or deformation in the in the stack so stay away from from square stickers if you can I'm not saying you shouldn't use them but it's better to have something that's a little wider than it is tall and then that way it avoids any of the you know the sticker being laid on its narrow edge versus it's what you know it's wide edge and then yourse tackle will grow nice and straight and then of course your lumber will be nice and straight as well when it comes out so now the placement of the sticker on the end of the of the board we've we've seen in how it's placed within the stack but now we're going to look at placement with on the ends now you want to get your sticker as close to the end as you can of course if you have a just a log that was bucked off and it's not quite square you won't you don't want to put the sticker right on the edge of the board now if your stack isn't getting moved around with a forklift you can bring it up to however close to the edge that you want now these units get moved around with forklifts so we stay in you know an inch to two inches from the end so that the stickers don't fall out when this when the stack gets picked up and one of these I should say this is one of those instance where you can use a wider stick or say like a two inch wide sticker or something like that because then you're slowing down the rate of drying right here on the ends of the boards this this end right here these dry out the fastest of all that's why you get the cracks on the ends of the boards if you can slow that down any you definitely want to do that so a wider sticker at the end of the stack is by far superior than you know a standard sticker that you using somewhere within the middle you can use a narrower sticker on the end it really doesn't matter but again you want to get it as close to the end as you possibly can so that way you're slowing down that rate of drying I'll reposition the camera here and show you some of the end checks on the boards now this stack is about four months old and so it's already showing signs of some cracks okay here's a pretty good example of event cracks here down here these are pretty small right now because the humidity is high but you can see there are cracks developing already this could be from just checking in the in the log before it was cut but oftentimes these will really develop once the board you know once the lumber has been sawn and it's tacked up and they usually don't go any much further past the end of the stair where the sticker is at and that again of course is because the wood is drying out at a much faster rate in front of the sticker than it does behind it so that's why you want to keep the sticker as close to this edge as you possibly can so now on the other end of the stack you know you see you're stacking one end nice and straight and so now you have boards that are various lengths and now you're having the problem well what do I do with my stickers on the ends well this is where the improvisation kind of comes in to play you know you're going to have to find the line where you can bring your stickers up in one vertical line and then the boards that stick out over the end they're just going to have to stick out over the end now cut them off if you have if you want to do that that's fine you don't have to just be aware that you know on these end of the boards you're probably going to develop a few more cracks than you would otherwise but really you know always go from the from the assumption that the shortest board is what you're going to end up using and anything that's longer is just bonus so again improvisation on this on the on the ends here now the final thing I'd like to talk about here in this video is using the prevailing winds to help dry your wood as you can see these stacks here you know there's an alley going down through them now these are only two wide on each bay so the one can health through and then also you have access with the forklift and you know if your hand stacking you can stack them of course narrow you don't have to go this wide but ideally you want the wind come down the alleyway a little bit of an angle so you get a little bit of buffeting on one side which creates a vacuum and draws out the moisture and but yet allows enough airflow to go down it to where it can carry it off as well so you don't want to turn it completely against the wind unless you have just one stack then it doesn't really matter but if you have you know like this a lot of wood you're going to try and utilize that prevailing wind to your advantage in that you put it at a little bit of an angle towards that towards that wind now the last point on this is of course roof covers and I'll show you some pictures here this is what you ideally want for a shed if you're going to have a shed to put your wood in you and here a typical roof caps you know for just regular units now I also mentioned the sacrificial layer I think in one of the previous parts of this video and here's a picture of a sacrificial layer as you can see the son has done quite a bit of damage to that top layer and that's something of course if you got you want to keep your good wood protected from the Sun so the same thing with the shed and you know along the sides the Sun can't reach it and bleach it out you can see some of this wood looks a little bleached but it's really not all that bad I've seen wood that was just completely ghost white almost or you know so bleached out and then crack that it was hog fuel he couldn't use it for anything else but so anyway that wraps up this episode of drying wood the woods beat or the wood series the woodworking series I should say sorry about that in the next video coming up we'll be talking about moisture meters because you know the first step in controlling or monitoring your drying process is being able to measure the moisture and so there's going to be a few pointers on how you can control that and what to watch for so if there's anything I missed here in this video by all means leave a comment in the comment section below if there's something you'd like to contribute to it also by all means leave a comment in the comment section below and I hope you enjoyed this video so thanks for stopping by and we'll see you again soon you

Channel: HolzMichel

Views: 76,792

Rating: 4.9186835 out of 5

Keywords: air drying lumber, lumber, raw lumber, stacking lumber, stacking stickers, drying lumber, drying wood, proper stack construction

Id: mPfsxhecMV4

Length: 23min 7sec (1387 seconds)

Published: Sun Mar 27 2016