When you cut down the tress, and get the wood slab from it, it is not ‘dead’ in some aspects, even without roots, the wood is ‘breathing’ in the air, it takes in or releases moisture based on the water content surrounding it. then there will be constant expanding and contracting for the wood. This is sometimes a factor that will be used to strengthen the joints but for most of the time it will cause some troubles for the finish looking and application.
A proper moisture content is important for the woodworking, you should be serious for this. So it become a very good question that, how dry does the wood need to be for woodworking?
To clear show this, we need first understand the Moisture Content, MC for short.
Moisture content or ranter water content is the water inside the wood, usually it is measured in percentage,but in the practice we need some special equipment to get this data, that is the moisture meters, Pin and pinless meters are the two main types of moisture meters. The principle of pin meters is the drier the wood, the more resistance to the electrical current, so it uses two pins to measure the resistance and change it to the readings of MC; meanwhile the pinless ones provides readings by the electromagnetic signal changes.
Then the question becomes what MC should the wood bear?
This requirement is varying because of the regions and applications, like in some wet areas the wood must be kiln or air-dried to a moisture level of 20% so to be used in fences, floors or some construction projects outdoors. Meanwhile if the wood are made into furniture indoor in some dry city, the wood must be dried to less than half of that, which is below 10%
In fact,because the water in the wood are divided into free water and bond water, and the air drying method could only dry the wood to an environment MC level, the most wood for wood working are kiln-dried, Shuowei vacuum drying kiln is one of the best drying methods.
It has a well sealed stainless steel chamber for the vacuum drying system, which allows the wood being dried at 35 ℃, it is better to keep the natural color and wood quality and then about the heating principles, this kiln adopts the high frequency technology and it creates a electrical field in the wood, thus the wood is heated evenly and directly, it is totally different from the traditional heat transfer method which is conducting heat from surface to core, and an advantage to this is, you could deadly stack(no spacer) the wood in the automatic timber cart, After all you will get the wood same quality as you put in, but dried, the drying circle will be within 8 days for 2” hardwood from over 50% Moisture Content (fresh cut ) to 8-10% MC. It is really a fantastic machine
Contact us for easier faster and higher quality wood drying solutions.
