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cants verses boards

Started by Flintlock427, October 19, 2018, 09:07:32 AM

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Flintlock427

I have several  ( maybe 15 trees pine  trees) to cut and ,I am thinking of storing the cants instead of cutting boards and stacking /sticking them .It may be a year are more before I  would need the wood .the question is , will the cants dry enough to use after drying a year are more right off  the saw mill .

moodnacreek

If you want boards, that's what would be best to saw.  Cants don't dry as nice as boards [splits, twisting, etc. When you resaw  the cants, 1 side ,of the board could be dryer and cause cupping. Thick wood is much harder to dry than thin and cutting it apart later will show this.

Chuck White

If it's going to be a year or so before you saw them, why not just peel the bark off of them and store them up off the ground about a foot or so until it's time to saw them!

With the bark removed, they should hold over pretty good!
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moodnacreek

I n my experience peeling logs for storage causes deep cracks and all the jacket boards are lost or worse.  An example of this is when walnut comes in the spring [or wet summer] handling the logs takes off some of the bark and if not sawn soon after the cracks start. Keeping logs wet or frozen is not perfect but better than trying to dry.

Southside

SYP cants will keep better than logs, but lumber will keep a lot better than cants.  By the time you go to use the lumber it will be dry and any movement or shrinkage will be out of it.  You also reduce the potential for blue stain by drying lumber rather than leaving it in a cant.  At least this time of year that issue is going away on it's own anyway.  

Having said that this summer I had sawn some 6x6 pine for a custom order that fell through, so they stayed off the ground for several months in the sun.  When doing some clean up a month or so ago I came across those and re-sawed them into 1" lumber.  They were drier than one would expect, but quality was so so.  For barn wood they were fine, but I would not want to use the lumber in a finished application.  
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Brad_bb

I only saw hardwood, but I've tested it, cutting cant's is not a good idea if you want boards.  First, you will likely have case stress in the can't - that is the outside of the can't will dry faster than the inside and will have tension in the outside.  When you later cut a board off the outside, it can bow.  As has been said you will have more checking in a cant than in a board.  So if boards is what you want, saw boards and stack and sticker them.  They'll dry better with less stress and less defects.  They'll also dry more quickly.

Now if you're milling beams and want to mill oversize because you'll later go over them again, that's fine.
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Brucer

If you saw cants, make sure they are FOHC. Otherwise you will get serious surface checking as they dry.

For softwoods, allow about 1 year per inch of thickness for the cant to dry. I confirmed that figure when a customer asked me to resaw some cants that he had me cut for him 2 years earlier.

I've read that the figure for hardwoods is 2 years per inch of thickness, but I've had no personal experience.
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