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Vacuum Drying Thin Veneer.

Started by old3dogg, April 03, 2015, 07:33:05 AM

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old3dogg

A fellow ask me a few days ago if I thought it would be beneficial to vacuum dry thin slices of hardwood veneer. What his company does now is soak 8/4 green hardwoods in a vat with water and steam, remove the lumber, slice it paper thin and then run it, piece by piece through a dryer.
His thoughts were to stack the thin slices together, stack them between the hot water platens and vacuum dry them.
I told him that back in the day I use to stack 1.5x3.25 hardwood flooring blanks 3 deep between the platens and dry them. It worked well and greatly increased the amount of board footage we could load into a vacuum kiln.
My thoughts are that yes, vacuum drying the stacks of thin veneer should work.
Your thoughts?

GeneWengert-WoodDoc

I saw a vacuum veneer dryer on the West Coast.  It worked very well except that the final MC was extremely variable.  If they over-dried the load, or at least over-dried some of the pieces so that there were no wets, then gluing was a problem with he over-dried pieces.  Over-drying is an issue for all veneer, but in a hot air system, we can control the humidity to prevent over-drying.

As we have stated before, Den's approach to vacuum drying is different, so it may work for veneer better than the older systems.
Gene - Author of articles in Sawmill & Woodlot and books: Drying Hardwood Lumber; VA Tech Solar Kiln; Sawing Edging & Trimming Hardwood Lumber. And more

Den Socling

We have kilns in Australia, Malaysia and New Zealand that dry lamella for engineered flooring. They put in stacks of thin wood to make a layer about 50 mm thick. I noticed, though, that you had to be careful with storage of dry lamella. We pulled and unloaded a load in NZ one day and it was dry and perfectly flat. A couple days later it was curled and cupped. I assumed it had picked up MC unevenly in the high humidity.

old3dogg

I did give him your name and number Den. Hope this was okay.

Den Socling

Certainly OK with me. I always follow leads. You can also send people to our website: http://www.vacdry.com/
Thanks  :)

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