Wht do you guys use for stickers?

[Doc]

I am very new to this and am wondering if you guys use cutoffs from the stuff you are milling for stickers or do you use something in particular (ie., oak, maple, poplar....)?

I understand that they need to be 3/4" thick, and I am assuming about that or an inch wide. What wood works best without leaving stains or causing problems? Does stickering out to the last couple of inches of the stack help control checking or is this going to happen anyway?

Doc

[Frank_Pender]

I use 1" x 1" Douglas Fir stickers.  As to your last question, yes, as near the end as possible.  I would also suggest you use an end sealer.   I use to use Anchor Seal.  I now use ACI end sealer as it is basically the same and the cost is less.

[Doc]

Where can I get the ACI stuff?

I am about to be going up with a friend to clear some trees from a homesite of his uncles. We are hauling the logs back to his place for storage till I get a mill (a few months down the road), and I am wanting to keep them in as decent a shape as possible till I can get to them.

Doc

[Larry]

For air drying I use 1" cottonwood.  For kiln drying I like 3/4" thick oak sticks that have been through the planer...so I can get more layers in the kiln.  For white woods clean sticks with a dado down the center to hopefully eliminate stick stain.

In any case they are all dry.

[Doc]

So I am going to assume again here. I am planning on building a solar kiln. I am gonna need stickers obviously. Can I cut stickers out of scraps of oak from the mill and dry them along with the load in the kiln, and reuse them or am I asking for trouble (stain)? Should I cut the stock for stickers and dry them first, and plane them down?

I may be making this harder than it really is, but it kinda seems like....which came first? the chicken or the egg?

Doc

[Daren]

I have given up wood stickers all together. I used to get all my stickers from a local  cabinet shops dumpster. They threw all the scrap in and and I would pick out a 1/2 a truckload of oak,cherry, hickory once a week. It was all 3/4" or 1" square kiln dried they had as cut off. I couldn't get the stickers not to pull moisture and mold and stain (oak did it every time). Now I use heavy wall cpvc pipe, I buy it in ten foot sticks. I just bought 500' ft from Grainger online, delivered to the door it was around $100. Cheap when you figure all the time I spent chasing or making sticker before. Since it is round there is not much sticker-wood contact which stopped stain. I don't stack real high (5' max) but I have had some pretty heavy loads on and they took it. cvpv is heat rated, so it should work in a kiln (I mostly air dry) It will last forever. One draw back for most would be the fact if the stack is not level lenghtwise all the boards will roll right off. I stack all my wood on a level slab. And if you have wood that likes to move sideways when it dries, there is not much friction to keep it from squirting right out the side of the stack. I mostly dry wide stuff, so keeping it flat is my concern, no problems there. I am kinda new to this, and I don't know all the tricks, but I got sick of chasing wood stickers, then having them ruin a nice stack of wide lumber.

[Furby]

Hmmmm............
Interesting idea, I'm now wondering about spliting the pipes in half.
Might try a layer or two in the next stack just to see how it works.

[Brian_P]

I like to use eastern red cedar for stickers. It is dry, open pored and relatively light. The light helps after the thousandth board foot on a long day. Stain seems to be minimal even used green because they start out at a low mc, about 30% or less as I recall, and dry quicker than any of the hardwoods. The only drawback is if you get a bad knot they break there. I cut them 3/4 by 1 1/4 so my fingers can tell which way is right without looking. Doug fir, as mentioned, has alot of the same properties if you can get it cheap.

[chet]

I would go broke using PVC pipe.    I use basswood for my stickers, I cut them 1"x1". Last year I cut up at least a half dozen full trees into stickers, and it looks like I'll need more.  :-\

Doc,
You definitely want to use dry stickers on your wood in a solar kiln.

[Ianab]

I make up stickers as I'm sawing, instead of taking off a thick slab to remove taper I can saw some stickers. I just use them rough sawn, so long as they are cut accurate. Any miss-cuts go in the kindling pile  ;) They aren't full length usually, but so long as I can get one or 2 stickers from the cut. Likewise if I'm cutting around a defect in the log, make some stickers.  When I first started I had to make stickers from the logs I was cutting. Luckily with cypress that works OK. Pine.. not so good.
Now I've got a good stash of stickers, so I just cut a few each log to replace the lost, broken, mouldy ones.

If you've got some low grade logs just cut em up into 1x1s, stack em up to air dry for a month ( or chuck them in the solar kiln ) and you should be good to go. For most applications air dried stickers should be OK. Green stickers is asking for trouble unless you have real easy to dry cedar / cypress etc.

[FeltzE]

Want to reduce sticker stain, DRY DRY DRY your stickers! 1 1/4 x 3/4 is what I use what ever spicies has made the trim pile. Dried and planed to uniform thickness.

Minimize the width of your stacks. Especially if you are in a location that dosn't get a good consistant breeze. A fellow I know had a few thousand feet of fresh cut SYP neatly stacked along athe edge of a 1/4 mile long field where there was no obstruction to the air flow. IT was drying beautifully. I am surrounded by trees and have to watch the SYP especially in the warmer weather to keep it from getting alot of blue stain and mold. AIR FLOW AIR FLOW AIR FLOW....

Put it straight in the nyle. and no problem...

Eric

[Daren]

Chet you don't throw em' out after every use :D, I was going broke cutting stickers just right and not sawing wood. The pipe comes exactly the same diam. so any one you grab is gonna give you a flat stack. Like I said figuring labor and messing around with kiln dried stickers that sucked water out of the wet pile before I even got it stacked, then staining the lumber, I think I am money ahead if I spend 2 grand on pipe that I will have for 20 years.

[Doc]

I might be able to run out some cedar. I love cedar....smells good. I have no basswood around here that I am aware of, and I have never seen a cottonwood either. I do have poplar oak and pine. I hate to waste oak for stickers unless it is cutoffs, I don't know if poplar would be worth a pitoot for stickers or not (?), and pine is messy to start with. Even if it doesn't stain the wood I am drying I don't want that sappy mess all over everything if it is not more pine.

The pvc pipe idea sounds workable....expensive but workable. I wonder how that would work out cut in half lengthwise. It woudl minimize contact even more, and provide more airflow through the stack (minimal but more), but if I set the pitch in pine using it I might be in trouble. I woudl hate ti find the upper temp limit in a load, and make a mess.

I do have a friend who owns a plastics company locally. I wonder if acrylic sticks would work or even polycarbonate sticks. he has cutoofs from big sheets constantly.


Doc

[Ianab]

Hi Doc

The cottonwood is a type of poplar (there are several).
Any of the poplar species should be OK for making stickers and I think it dries fairly fast.

And I agree about the messy pine  >:(

Cheers

Ian

[old3dogg]

I love the PVC idea. Smart thinking. Yea! Split them in half on a little band saw to get rid of the stack wanting to roll away. That is a really cool idea!

[Daren]

Splitting would give a little more friction to stop side movement, and the rolling if its not level. An arch is a very strong shape, it should hold almost as much weight as the whole pipe. If it would work, that is 1/2 as many feet of pipe to buy also. I though I was so smart with the pipe idea, you guys made my setup even better.

[Furby]

Only thing would be the pipes flatting out, wether they are round or halves, they WILL flatten with too much weight. I sure would not stack one lift on top of another.

Daren, how tall of piles do make?

[Daren]

My situation may be different from others, I spread out instead of up. I only stack 5' high. Schedule 80 cpvc is heavy duty, I just stickered 18" wide 8/4 soakin' wet sweet gum today 5' high. They were 8' long, I don't know without checking the "lumber weight calculator" what they weighed, but it was plenty. The bottom pipes had to have a jag on them, but they are solid. Again, I air dry, in a kiln they are going to get softer and may smash.

[Doc]

My situation may be different from others, I spread out instead of up. I only stack 5' high. Schedule 80 cpvc is heavy duty, I just stickered 18" wide 8/4 soakin' wet sweet gum today 5' high. They were 8' long, I don't know without checking the "lumber weight calculator" what they weighed, but it was plenty. The bottom pipes had to have a jag on them, but they are solid. Again, I air dry, in a kiln they are going to get softer and may smash.

What temp rating is sched 80? Thinking that may not be good if I am using them setting pitch in pine, and I don't want to have to restack just to set pitch (this from reading).

They woudl certainly be usable for at least airdrying, and maybe a load of something that won't be run crazy high hot. Still a very good idea either full pipe, or cut in half. I am glad I read all these threads.

Doc

[Daren]

 CPVC, with a design stress of 2,000 psi and maximum service temperature of 210 degrees F has, over a period of about 25 years, proven to be an excellent material for hot corrosive liquids, hot and cold water distribution and similar applications above the temperature range of PVC.

I didn't type that above I just copy and pasted from a pipe companies site. The pipe I use says "280 psi @ 200 deg. f." or something like that I don't remember exactly (I have just cleaned that writing off with primer for 15 years as a plumber/pipefitter) But it will take alot of abuse, you can drive a truck over it. That's more that I can say for my coffee thermos, I found out the hard way one morning.

[Furby]

Not going to argue on strength, as I have used it for stuff I never thought it would hold up too.
However, I belive the PSI rating is for pressure inside the pipe, not outside pressure.

[FeltzE]

I've been trying to keep quiet but what the heck...

With all the trim around a sawmill operation I don't understand why anyone would buy pipe or commercial sticks .... unless there is exceptionallly large quantities involved or the quality of the lumber is adequate and required  for the "breeze dry" sticks. But then of course you need to have adequate airflow through your stacked lumber to even make a difference...

That is where I'd start, improve airflow, use dry sticks.

Eric

[Daren]

I'll be honest another reason I use pipe it is a direct 100% tax write off as material. I have a plumbing shop, the sawmill is a part-time venture. I was losing money, i.e. labor messing with wood stickers. The pipe cuts to length in 1 second with a pair of ratchet cutter I keep in my pocket.

Not going to argue on strength, as I have used it for stuff I never thought it would hold up too.
However, I belive the PSI rating is for pressure inside the pipe, not outside pressure.

Your right, I just copied that info, I'm not trying to convince anyone to do anything different. The question was "wht do you guys use for stickers?" That is what I use.

[Furby]

Hey I like the concept myself, might change my mind after trying it though.
I do plan to give it a try on a small scale.
As far as mill scraps are concerned, what are they ???
I sure don't have enough and I cut whole logs for stickers and am still running out. I may get a couple per log by edging, but find I'd rather pull that wider board out then get one more sticker. :

[DanG]

Since my mill takes one board at a time, I just cut a 1x1 whenever I can't get anything else out of what is left.  I never lack for sticker material.  I tend to go with Don Lewis' explanation of the mc of your stickers. In another thread, he recommended NOT kiln drying them.  He said the really dry stickers would wick moisture from the lumber, causing checking under the stick. Make's sense to me.   I try to use stickers from the same species as the lumber. I have no basis for this policy, but it makes sense to me and that's what I do.

All that being said, I don't have a kiln, and I mostly dry pine, since that's mostly what I got.  I got all sorts of drying problems, but sticker stain ain't one of them.