I am my Tools
April 13th, 2009I Made Lumber!
I guess I must be the greatest tool expert who ever lived. I don’t see how there can be any doubt, because today I installed a WIXEY DIGITAL READOUT on my planer, and I used the planer to joint and thickness a mahogany board!
Bask in the light of my greatness, tiny unimportant people.
I ordered a set of indexable lathe tools. The case they came in was mashed. I had a bunch of mahogany I had rescued from a trash heap. I decided to make a new case. To do that, I had to have finished wood. To get that, I needed to install the readout that had been sitting on the dining room table since the Bush administration.
It’s pretty cool. I like digits better than the tape-measure-type scale that came with the planer.
I really enjoyed myself. I installed the readout, and then I planed a short board to 0.930″ (that was the thickness when it finally got flat on both sides). I squared one end of the board on the table saw, made a makeshift jig, and jointed the edges of the board. Then I squared the other end and resawed the board on the bandsaw. After that, I planed the results. Now I have two bookmatched mahogany boards. They’re gorgeous, too.
Problem: the wood is not really seasoned. It bowed a little when I resawed it. I don’t really care; I’m cutting it to such short lengths, the bowing will probably be too slight to amount to anything, and it’s just a crappy box to hold some tools.
I stuck it on a table with some junk mail under it and books on the ends of each board. Hopefully that will reduce the bowing.
Tomorrow I get to cut the pieces, rout out holes for the tools, and turn the results into a box. It should be a blast.
Things worked out well. You have to plane a board in order to install the DRO, and a DRO is a nice thing to have when you thickness a resawn piece of wood, so one project fed into the other.
That mahogany is going to be amazing. Some day. When it’s really ready.
No pictures. Too lazy.
More
One reason wood warps when you resaw it is water. Wet wood likes to be big. Dry wood likes to be small. The wood I resawed today was not very far into the seasoning process. Presumably, the inner parts were wetter than the outer. That would explain why it bowed away from the saw cut. The wet sides expanded when the saw released them, and that made them longer than the dry sides, so they took on a curve toward the dry.
I hoped that when I took it into the air conditioning, the wet sides would dry and contract, and the wood would start to straighten. And that is exactly what’s happening. One board is nearly straight now.
The question of the moment is, will it stop when it’s straight, or will it keep going until it bows in the other direction?
April 13th, 2009 at 5:23 PM
The bowing is, of course, due to stresses in the wood, released when you resawed it. The mail/book method of plank straightening is a losing battle.
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The thing to do is to cut and resaw the lumber to rough dimension, then let it sit for a while – days, maybe even weeks – before milling to finished dimension.
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Unless, of course, it’s just a crappy box to hold some tools. In which case, go for it.
April 13th, 2009 at 5:39 PM
I was told to let this stuff dry for a year before using it. I think it’s been three months. I can’t say I’m shocked that it warped a little.
April 13th, 2009 at 9:34 PM
You can make a vacuum tank type drying kiln. You might be able to use a corny keg and a little AC vacuum pump for small pieces. At a good vacuum you should be able to dry the wood in days not years.
An old doctors autoclave is good because they have big wide doors and good seals. I’ve seen old pressure cookers used for the same purpose, just replace the pop off with a vacuum fitting and a valve.
In commercial kilns the wood is banded together in bunks with thin scants between the layers and rows so they don’t warp and so the air can circulate easily. Even commercial places are starting to use vacuum because it drys very thoroughly.
April 13th, 2009 at 9:53 PM
It will stop when it reaches EMC-equilibrium moisture content. Probably somewhere in the area of 13% where you are. And Russ is correct, putting weight on it is fruitless. A piece of wood that is inclined to move will do so, no matter what you do. Ever wonder how stone masons, in the days before electric or hydraulic machinery split large chunks of granite off of a larger stone? Wood-holes would be bored, a wooden plug inserted, and then filled with water. The expanding wood took care of the rest.
April 14th, 2009 at 3:46 AM
A few silly comments this morning…
They recommend placing new dimensional lumber or wood flooring in the place where it will end up living i.e. the room or house for a few days before installing in order to acclimate it to the job it’s going to be doing.
Second, in Miami, with your climate, I suspect that it’s impossible to stabilize just any virgin slab of hard or soft wood which hasn’t already been “kiln dried” because all wood has internal water at a cellular level and an intra-molecular/intra-cellular level that lives there with the cellulose and the hemi-cellulose and the organic VOC’s and makes the wood hydroscopic i.e. it will assume a moisture level and possibly a warped shape based on the ambient weather conditions of any given day/week/month/year.
Thus the reason my carport door sticks in the winter and moves freely in the spring and summer.
(I’m not making this stuff up or just Googling to impress you and your other readers–I’m currently professionally involved in a “biomass bio-fuels project” and my brain is overflowing with forest products data no one but you and I and my customer could possibly care about…)
Check the web sites about kiln dried lumber…for smaller pieces you could pre-saw and then to speed the drying process up bake the smaller wood slabs & planks in your kitchen oven at very low temp for a few hours to dry out the excess “free moisture” before resawing and power plaining the boards down to their final thickness.
Then again, you could just build toolboxs shaped like a corkscrew and sell them on E-bay…to tie died Kumbaya singing Patchuli wearing hippies at Berkley.
April 14th, 2009 at 9:12 AM
Time to hunt for more trash wood – by the time it is seasoned you will be building entire furniture sets for people. You will need a larger supply of seasoned wood. I should take a trip down to scavenge some mahogany. It tends to be hard to grow in VA.
April 14th, 2009 at 2:53 PM
I guess everyone is right about Texans barbecuing beef, but that would simply mean I would be a missionary.