What is a Wood Kiln and How Does it Work?

welcome back to another episode of getting real at hill farms today we're gonna show you we're back here at Hill custom lumber and today we're gonna show you how it would take green lumber and turn it into dried lumber okay Cory so this right here what we have this is a stack of poplar so this stuff is what you'd call green lumber this just came off the sawmill it's not ready to be used inside your home yet inside your dry it first and the basic idea of kiln drying you're removing the moisture if you would take this green lumber and put it in your house in your house is lower than the humidity outside so what would happen that would shrink whether it be flooring cabinetry you get gaps in between the boards causes a lot of problems so we'll put it in the kiln and that'll drive out the moisture make it ready to use in the home so as you can see here the boards are sticker stack we call these little strip stickers and that allows air flow to go directly through and touch all sides of the boards and that makes it dry evenly so we can take you over to the kiln we'll open it up we actually have a load of lumber coming out and we'll show you that process all right so we're staying inside of one of our kilns here we run three kilns and total this is our biggest than our newest this was built in fall of 2018 all our kills are Nile dehumidification kilns and the principle behind them they are like dehumidifier your home they actually draw all the moisture out of the wood and separate that moisture and it drains out his water so as you can see above us here we have a fan by for this particular killing run six fans and this baffle separates the air so if you step in here you'll see this is our lumber these are walnut slabs two inch thick heavy walnut slabs and what happens the air circulates down and around and through and it drives it through this snack through those stickers we saw earlier forcing air over the surface of the wood that's why we have everything baffled to push that air through the air and then this is our actual drawing unit that pulls the moisture out and it just goes right along that drip line outside so will on baffle this this is a card system this particular kiln we phat this all up here in house and we'll show you how that works it will get it ready for the next [Music] [Music] so I guess to explain a little bit what you're doing here this plastic falls down here because the air is driven on that side comes down underneath and then forced to come back through the pile of wood instead of coming just across the ties that's exactly right we're trying to channel that here exactly where we wanted which is through this stack of wood it does us no good to go around the stack of wood we want all the air flow straight through so you're really directing where the currents going where the flow is going at every day and Serna drives it straight to this drawing unit which has a fan in itself which circulates the air through pulling the moisture out of it so there's a purpose for everything that's ending or why to set up the way it is and right now this kiln right now is actually still we shot this down this morning and it's still about 90 degrees in here we'll run this kiln at a temperature generally between 100 and 120 degrees we can run it up to 150 degrees to sterilize it to kill any insects and to set the pitch in fine so it doesn't you know so the puns not sappy when you bring it in your home so how long does it take them to dry a load of wood depending on different factors it depends on what type of what it is in the thickness the thicker the wood the longer it takes this particular batch of walnut is 2 inches thick this has been in here for three weeks we can draw pine and poplar in as little as a week hope takes four weeks so it really depends on the type of wood some woods you can dry much faster than others some you have to drive very slow so you don't you know over dry them you know cause end checks and and other defects and more thing so where did you get the idea to build this is this something that they got out of a book or you just fill it from a lot of ideas put together this is my third one so third time's a charm I picked up stuff I've learned from my other two kilns and I all systems the company that manufactures these drawing units is really good to work with for technical support they've been in business a long time so they're very well-versed in these systems and what works and doesn't work so I took ideas from a lot of different sources to make this this is kind of a a hybrid type system this is actionable we're standing in right now is a 40-foot insulated shipping container and I adapted that it's very well-suited for this because of the stainless steel interior and it's very tightly insulated a lot of this moisture that comes off this wood especially the Oaks is very acidic very corrosive so plain steel will just rust so everything in here is either aluminum stainless steel it's built to last so yeah this is this is a hybrid of ideas this track system was kind of my own idea you'll see that a little bit later how we have it set up with a winch to move in and out but yeah the information is out there but like I said this is my third third iteration on building a kiln and I think I fine tuned it now this is I wish they were all built this way but you learn as you go how do you know when the buns ready to come out of the oven I have a moisture meter there's different types of moisture meters we use a Wagner pinless moisture meter so I can just come in here and take samples and show the moisture content on the wood you know I just check different areas throughout the pile and make sure it's all uniform and typically between 6 and 8 percent moisture content that's what we shoot forward with hardwoods that's the ideal moisture content for in your home so this is scientific you're not just looking at saying yup looks like it's done now you don't guesswork there's really no way to look at a piece of wood and tell how dry it is there's just you know you can you can kind of feel by weight and certain stuff but yeah you have to measure to be accurate so you can give good consistency with the product that you're putting exactly exactly which is critical especially for our organ flooring operation we can't afford to send out a bad batch would you know that's going to copper twist or move on a customer so so we're very particular to make sure you know that it's it's all within the spec before it leaves it [Applause] [Music] yapple good so here we're all set up to pull this out now like I said the killin power is actually the easy part to build cuz there's there's plenty of examples on that sometimes the other auxiliary stuff is the challenge like I mentioned before we fab this all right here from scratch we had to make our own track system basically it's kind of similar to a railroad track we set up this winch this winch can be used to pull the load out and pull it back in we have a pulley mounted to the back wall there to pull the load back in so it's all set up we pulled it out [Music] so what we have here these are actually 18 to 20 foot long walnut slabs we're actually custom drawing these for a customer this isn't my own wood we do a lot of custom drawing for people so we're about to unload these and we'll prep it and we'll be loading up the next load and we basically keep these kilns running 24/7 365 days a year so this wood here what would a person you would like this for these live-edge slabs have become very popular in the last couple of years they're used for a lot of different rustic style things whether it be bars benches desks head boards for beds I've seen them used in a lot of creative ways live-edge a lot of times what people will do they'll peel this bark off and leave the live edge of the tree there which just makes for a really unique piece of furniture so you just want to point out as we mentioned earlier this whole system is powered by a solar panel and charging a battery so once again being harvesting the free electricity that Sun provides and you know being a little bit more eco friendly so you got to pull this off the rack [Applause] [Applause] [Music] alright what's out of the kill now and it's nice and dry so what's the next step after that Cory what we'll do from there we'll sort through it some is destined for flooring other stuff is stuff we'll set aside for our retail business right here is a selection of our retail would we'd like to try to keep everything in stock that a customer can just come and pick out you know their own boards and we try to keep a little bit of everything we have some walnut cherry maple right here just for instance this stuff's all kiln dried ready to be used in your own projects so like I said we'll sort through it and determine the best use of the wood whether it be for flooring or it's too nice for flooring it'll they'll be sitting here waiting for you to come by it man alrighty that's really interesting so now we know how to do it up to this point so we're anxious to see what happens once you have it ready to go and to be made into a project so we'll stop back at another day when you're making some flooring or some molding or some kind of paneling or something that a customer has ordered and we'll take a look and see how that process is done so until then remember keep it real you

Channel: Hill Farms

Views: 100,063

Rating: 4.8827224 out of 5

Keywords: wood, woods, hill farms, hill custom lumber, custom lumber, lumber, timber, lumbering, timbering, wood kiln, wood mizer, drying wood, unloading wood, hardwood, hardwood flooring, softwood, hardwood paneling, walnut, ash, logs, log, board, boards, pine, oak, white ash, homestead, homesteading, work, railroad, nature, wood drying

Id: 6wUV50oPZRE

Length: 15min 0sec (900 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 21 2019