stickers

[pineywoods]

Neighbor sawyer (LeroyC on here) got an order for 12,000 5 ft 1X1 stickers, to be picked up in less than week. Lucky he had a bunch of bug-killed pine logs. Using his mill and mine from daybreak till dark , we delivered. If you need a bunch of stickers in a hurry, we can show you how to do it. Ever see a semi load of stickers ?

 

[Woodey]

I use 1" X 1" SYP stickers 48" long. They work great for all types of wood and don't leave sticker stain when they are dry.

I like your sticker shed redbeard. I've been wanting to build some type of storage for my extra sticker. Last week I went to get some stickers off a pallet out by the kiln. The ants built a big mound under the pallet and though the stickers.

[drobertson]

I use oak and pine stickers, 1- 1/8 sq. 42" long.  I do like the idea of putting them in barrels, however, I do like to keep weight on them to keep them flat while drying.  I have drying racks  I store mine in held by four sides, and let the weight of the stickers to maintain the weight.  some will bow and curl, I use these for short term uses.  From what I have seen from a few local kilns, their stickers are used and abused, and the allowable amount left for planing covers any variation caused by stickers or normal stress that occurs during the drying process.  Again, I am just a has been tool maker that love the smell of sawdust. 

[Dustin]

How long would it take to air dry 1 inch pine stickers before you would use them?

[OH logger]

thanks for all the ideas folks. i think there are as many ideas for stickers and sticker making as there are sawmills. any way this helps out a lot thank you

[drobertson]

Dustin, sorry I don't have a good answer for you on this.  I have three racks that I use, and try to keep them in order of how I cut them, as to their moisture content.  I try to keep them from laying completely flat against one another but they do at times lay flat, I have not ran anything through a kiln with mine, so I could be speaking way out of turn. This being said,  after a few years of dealing with them, one can tell from their weight as to how dry they are.  After all, looking at how flooring mills around here stack their lumber for air drying outside, I can only presume that there has to be some absorbtion of humidity into the stickers.  It would be nice if some folks commented on just how much sticker stain really affects the finish product after planing,  I never heard how deep this stain goes into the boards.

[Jim_Rogers]

How long would it take to air dry 1 inch pine stickers before you would use them?

I think that all depends on the time of year that they are cut. It could be as low as 90 days or as high as 120 or more depending on lots of variables.

I stack my stickers on pallets or someone may call them skids as there is no board across the bottom. Just a deck with two legs to hold up the deck for the fork lift to get under. Some of the most recent pallets I've made have three legs.

Here is a drawing of my pallet of stickers:



And the pallet/skid only:



When we started with the sawmill we only had some logs and the sawmill. We had to make everything else we needed.
So we made blocks to stack the lumber on and we made stickers to put between the rows.

I think we read in the "kiln dryers handbook" that the stickers should be of hardwood and I don't know if it said the sizes that should be used or not. But we decided on 1" thick and 1 1/2" wide and 4' long.
I think they recommend piles of lumber 4' wide. I know my forks are only 42" so we can't go much wider.

Anyway, we needed to have dry stickers. So we built a solar sticker dryer. I don't have a picture of it when it was new. And it's nearly gone now, and I don't want to show you the sad shape it's in.
But we made it just like you'd make a regular solar lumber dryer, only the length was very short. Just enough for the stickers and some space around them as required by the plans we got somewhere for a solar dryer.

We'd stack the oak stickers in there and let them go for about a month. I think we used the weight test to tell when they were dry. And we'd unload them and reload another batch the same day.
We had an indoor outdoor thermometer so we could see how hot it got inside. We hooked it up backwards so outside was inside. And it would get up to 110°F or more on a sunny day.

To keep track of the "dry" stickers we painted the ends with red paint from a spray can.
I stick all my regular lumber with red end stickers and any outgoing custom sawing lumber with regular air dried pine stickers.

I keep a pallet or two of air dried pine stickers for customer to use with their custom sawing lumber. And I don't give them away. I charge them for the stickers.

The air dried pine stickers I make from edgings are 1" thick and 2" wide x 4' long.

When I'm edging pine boards I usually drop 2" to clean up an edge from 10" to 8" and or from 8" down to 6" and such.
So I make sticker stock all the time I'm edging boards on the mill.

Back in 02 or so, I did a big custom sawing job for a local tree service where I sawed up 60 pine logs for a truck garage. The garage was 40' wide and 50' long and had a 16' ceiling.
While sawing up all the posts for this pole barn type structure, all the nailers and all the siding, I made a mountain of sticker edgings. I didn't take the time to cut them as I went along, I just tossed all the sticker edgings into a pile next to my slab saw table.

Then after the job was done I took a day or so and cut up all the stickers left over from that job. And I think I may have added some more to the pile as I remember it when I was done, I had 5 pallets of stickers.
I placed them in the back of my lumber yard and let them air dry.

This past summer I finally used up the last pallet from that job. I can't believe they lasted me 10 years, but they did.

I started saving a new stack of edging for a new pallet of stickers.

And I had to take a lift of 1x4x8 and cut it up to make a new pallet of dry stickers.

I rarely ever sell any 1x4's and I only stock them for making pallets and stickers.

I didn't get that many stickers from the lift I cut up because it was only a small part of a lift.

Well any way that's my sticker story.

I hope it has helped you, some.

Jim Rogers

[Okrafarmer]

"Well any way that's my sticker story."

And you're sticking to it.  ;)

At Hancock lumber in Maine, seems like we used birch stickers.

I ended up with some sticker stain on some of my pine lumber recently. Not sure why, I guess my stickers must have been green.