Building with green wood

[Nate Surveyor]

I went out in the local mountains yesterday, and found several small cabins that were (apparently) built with green wood.

The board and bat siding had pulled loose on one side, and all.

Is there a good source of information on building with green wood?

I have been told if you do this, NOT to close up the walls for at least 9 months, and to only place one nail in the middle of wide boards.

Anyway, I'm looking for information.

Nate

[ellmoe]

Nate,

   When my customers purchase wide green boards for B&B I suggest that they only nail one side of the board and the corresponding side of the batten. That way the building looks finished, yet the lumber can shrink in place with less probability of cracking. This has been successful to date.

Mark

[Dale Hatfield]

Nate
My class and I built a 12x16 building. Poplar frame lumber, White Pine lap siding. All green lumber.
We had 2 crews one sawing and one building.  They actually cut all the trees that were used to build with. Outside of a few misplaced nails ones that should have never been their,next to knots,ends of boards.Its been up now for 4 years no pulled boards ,and only splits are at bad nail locations. Its insulated and finished on the inside.
I have no problems with it. I figger the 100 year old house that  I live in was built with green or less than dri lumber.
Dale

[Sprucegum]

Was there much warping of the boards on the sunny side?
What did you use for insulation and finish on the inside?

My "plan" is to get my mill running in the spring, cut everything I need for a small cabin, build it and use it by fall 

[Corley5]

I built my house from green lumber fresh off the mill.  Nail the H*** out of it with ring shank or ardox (spiral) nails so the boards can't move .  I wrapped the house with Typar on the outside fairly soon after the sheathing was on and panelled, drywalled and sided throughout the following year. 

[Dale Hatfield]

It has no finish on it .Its lap siding 1/2inch thick on2 foot studs. no warping,just graying.
Isulation just the itchy pink. drywall inside
Dale

[Reddog]

I have always done it the same as Corley5. The more nails and glue the better.

[Sprucegum]

Sounds like a doable plan - I just need it to get 30 degrees warmer to get started  :-\

[Dale Hatfield]

We even used wood for the soffits. it shrank and now have plenty of holes to vent .
Dale

[ely]

i built a shed out of board and bat with oak. it was green off the mill, only problem i had was where i used screws, the boards broke them when they shrunk. i used nails after that and had no problems at all. except i had to tighen a few of the nails back up witha  hammer.

[Kelvin]

I think board and batten was invented for working with fresh sawn lumber.  However, you cannot overcome mother nature and lumber shrinkage with nails, screws or glue.  You need to work with it.  First thing is i would find lumber that is very stable to begin with.  Pine is very dry when cut, and doesn't shrink terribly when it dries further.  Most of the barns around me are white pine siding, and its lasted 100 years as B&B siding.  Otherwise hardwood wise we have a lot of ash going to waste out here in michigan.  it is notoriously dry when standing at something like 45 % MC compared to say cottonwood which is, believe it or not, about 125% MC when green.  WHich will shrink more?  Stickering and air drying even a few months helps emensely.  All this being said i built my whole house with green off the saw wood.  I even used a great deal of  cottonwood siding as its readily available in large clear sizes, and nobody else wants it.  It may not last forever, but i know where i can get more.  Old timers would nail at angles so as the boards shrunk they wouldn't pull the nails but straighten them out.  Think about which way that would work, heads tipped towards the battens.  I've had hardly any trouble and certainly no boards coming loose.  I would avoid one nail per 12" wide board, but the battens would hold fairly well.  I'd just be worried about cupping due to the sun drying the sides unevenly. 
The other biggie is ventaliation.  B&B siding on barns dried out b/c there was nothing behind it.  Water will get behind it, so you need to treat this problem.  I used heavy weight tar paper over the building and furring strips over that to make an air gap of about 1" behind the B&B siding to help keep it dryer.  This helps keep water out of the insulation as well.  Big problems there!
Things to think about,
KP

[Handy Andy]

  Just a thought, if you were using green siding, couldn't you use lap siding and just top nail it?  Give it plenty of lap, 45 the corners and after it is dry, nail the bottom edge of the siding.

[Don P]

Actually the same rule applies to lap siding. It really shouldn't be pinned edge to edge to the piece below, simply clamping it but letting each piece float. Green lap siding does curl like crazy.
I have built with green wood but it certainly isn't my first choice.

[StorminN]

Hi guys,

I'm in the process of building a 16'x24' cabin, and I'm using western red cedar board & batten for the siding. I just milled and stickered some 3/4" cedar in various widths, and also some 1" thick battens. The cabin walls and roof are up, but it has no doors or windows and one endwall that is open. I stacked the cedar in the building to dry it a bit.

Any recommendations on how dry (what percentage) I should let the cedar get before I put it up? When I put it up, it will have tar paper underneath it, over the 3/4" plywood sheathing. I was going to let the cedar go a month or two and then test it... I've got a meter. The sapwood was pretty wet, but the heartwood was pretty dry when I milled it. Winters here are always wet and not always below freezing, so I'm not sure how long it will take.

Thanks,
-Norm.

[Don P]

Well since we're all over the road on whether to use green or dry I doubt anyone can point to a majic number. There is less movement if you are close to in service average moisture content, that'll usually be somewhere around 12%. Remember wood doesn't begin shrinking till its below the fiber saturation point, for most woods thats around 28% or so, but in WRC its down as low as 18% before it even begins to move.

I put up some pine siding over the past couple of days that is drier than the day I sawed it. I know the customer (me) and he's ok with a little rustic charm.

[Ironwood]

I have seen in old Gov't printed pamphlets, and books about building w/ green wood. The most dinstinctive thing was placing the underlayment at 45 degrees starting from the corners. The thought as I recall was that as the wood shrank and kept the building from racking or weakening.

                              Ironwood

[Don P]

One other reason to place board sheathing diagonally is as the rack bracing, triangles are immutable, they do not change shape. With plywood sheathing we tend to forget this old wisdom although it is really doing the same thing. Buildings without some type of adequate diagonal bracing won't stay square and plumb for very long. There's a corncrib I pass on the way to work built as a small gable roofed building with horizontal skip sheathing, no diagonals. It has been leaning more each year as the rectangles become parallellograms. I think this winter will be its last.

[SAW MILLER]

One more advantage of diagonal sheathing for siding .When you are nailing on vinyl siding,you may have your nails lined up on a big ole 3/4 inch crack if the sheathing is nailed on horizontal.If your sheathing is on an angle...just move your nail over an inch and you are in good wood.
  I have tried different demensions for battens and I like 3/4 inch thick by 3 inches wide.

[Captain]

When building our small outbuildings, we build with green 8" Eastern White Pine board and batton all of the time.  We screw everything - one screw in the middle of the board, screws in the battons.  No splits and minimal cupping, everything can be tightened later.  When we are doing the New England 4" clapboard siding, we will sheathe on the diagonal as Reid mentions.

We are just getting tooled up with the QuikDrive coallated screw system for this coming year, hopefully it takes some of the labor time and cost out of the screwing operation  :

Captain

[rewimmer]

We use the brown colored screws made for pine and cedar. They can be purchased at the box stores and we have never had one to brake or pull out. They also work well on poplar and hemlock. I almost forgot they also work well on green wood.
Robert in Virginia

[solidwoods]

Is there a good source of information on building with green wood?

Yes- Don't

Anyway, I'm looking for information.

*see above

Nate
[/quote]

Wood bends best when its wet and hot.
Green wood bends easy, also not restricting it during drying allows it to warp easier.
Buiding with green wood (except for projects that exploit the assests of green wood) is like trying to re-invent the wheel.
jim

[Nate Surveyor]

I live on a hilltop. The wind never stops for long. If I mill wood, and sticker stack it, it looses 1/2 it's weight in about 3 wks. (just guessing) So, I guess I am not really using GREEN wood, but NOT all the way dry, like a kiln does.

Is there a device to measure moisture in this wood?

So far, it all seems stabilized. Slight shrinkage is all.

I am building a kids cabin for a test run.

Nate

[Ianab]

Is there a device to measure moisture in this wood?

Thats a moisture meter  ;)

If you dont have one you can actually use weight of the wood to measure the moisture content. To get a rough quide as to how dry it is, take a sample board and weigh it. Put it back in the stack, wait a week and weigh it again. It should be lighter because it's lost water. Do this each week, and when it stops loosing weight, its 'dry'. This doesn't tell you EXACTLY how dry, but it's as dry as it's going to get in that location.

If you want to know the exact moisture content you can also use a small sample board, an oven and some accurate scales. You weigh the board, then bake or microwave it on low power untill it's bone dry. Weigh again and see how much water your sample lost. That lets you work out what the M/C of your sample was.

It's also an interesting experiment to weight the 0% moisture sample again over a few weeks and watch how it gains moisture again from the atmosphere and ends up at a similar moisture content to the original air dried wood.

Cheers

Ian

[stonebroke]

baileys sells moisture meters.

Stonebroke

[andybuildz]

I have this one http://www.amazon.com/Sonin-50211-Rapitest-Concrete-Moisture/dp/B0000224DA/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&s=hi&qid=1200936690&sr=1-3
It's cheap but it works great for me. I originally bought it from my paint store. I wanted to check the moisture content of the cedar shingle siding I put up so I'd know when it was safe to prime and paint it.
It really is a good little meter especially for the price.
Most paint stores sell them or you can get it from amazon cheap enough.