Air Drying Beginner

[jemmy]

I am from NW Ohio, have all kinds of weather here and clay soil. I have a 28 acre flat plot of land (7 wooded) that I am able to use and build on that has full amenities, I have very limited funds for drying for the foreseeable future given the amount of equipment and projects in line. I have never dried lumber before. Soon I plan on having lots of lumber to dry. I dont have any idea on how I want to approach a kiln. But I do need to learn the art of drying outdoors as I will need to start stacking and drying soon. So I know the stack should be level (dont know how to ideally/efficiently/cost effectively do this), ideally protected from rain/weather with metal roofing material and shade curtain things. I heard you should keep them out of the sun. I could probably put a lot stacks in the woods to keep them shaded, but I imagine that is a bad idea in the swamp land of Ohio. For a flat start should I use stone? Bricks? Concrete? Can I stack a mile high on a small space? 3/4" sticker? or is there an advantage/disadvantage to a 1" sticker? Should I buy a 55 gallon drum of anchor seal? Do/should I build a lean to? I literally have no idea how I should approach and what will work. I havent seen any other posts about beginners and a full guide to on air drying. Anybody have a book, and or game plan suggestion/links etc? I think I will air dry then finish stuff off at a kiln when/if needed, and eventually build/buy a kiln. 

[Don P]

Well cool, I get to put a book under your Christmas tree ;D
Air Drying of Lumber

[moodnacreek]

You do need to read up on it. The pile must be flat and that is hard to keep as the pile gets high and heavy. If the lumber dries twisted you might want to burn it. Close to the ground will never dry in your state. Sticker spacing, 2 foot or closer, lined up straight and only dry sticks. Tin roofing with overhang all around and weight. More to it than most think to make good lumber.

[Brad_bb]

I stack on pallets, custom pallets that I made like many others on here.  Doc_henderson recently had a thread going on building pallets.  Stack and sticker on pallets 28-34" high.  I think Yellowhammer, or WDH or somebody gave a height recommendation somewhere in there.  Try to keep your stacks consistent height.  It will make moving lumber stacks much easier being on pallets, and I know from your other post that you have equipment to move the stacks.  

So, you have not buildings/no inside space?
I'd recommend drying them outside for a few weeks or whatever it takes to get the outside dry enough that the lumber will not mold.  I mill Mostly Ash and Walnut, and a little cherry and honey locust.  Honestly I put my fresh sawn lumber on stacks directly in my Morton building.  there are a few places under the wall where animals have dug out some of the gravel and some gaps in the 3 pair or sliding doors.  There must be enough air exchange in there to keep from molding and to dry my wood. Summer is hot and humid in IL like where you are, so that's whey mold can grow most quickly.  Do not dead stack or you'll have a ton of mold between boards.  Winter is very dry.  Air drying will bring the MC down to Ambient which for me is around 12%.  Once you reach that, you can then have it kiln dried down to 6-8% for wood that is for use in conditioned space.  You have to have a conditioned place to store wood that it dried down that far.  If you put it back in the shed, it will reabsorb moisture to ambient levels.  

Also Cut stickers first so that they have time to dry and so that you have plenty of them.  I use Ash for Ash, and Walnut stickers for walnut.  Ash will work fine for other species other than walnut though, as long as they are dry.  Trust me, you will need a lot of stickers.  On an 8 ft pallet, figure 9 stickers per layer. 

If you're only option is to air dry outside, then I would say you still need inside space to deadstack the air dried material when it's down to ambient moisture content (MC).  Or be prepared to get it kiln dried right away, then planed, and up for sale.

[EOTE]

Ohio has a lot of challenges with the weather but you can successfully dry your lumber outside with the proper care and attention to what is needed.

To give you an idea of what I had to go through when I bought my sawmill and had no experience, I had to make several decisions so my newly sawn lumber wouldn't rot or mold and would have minimal twisting and turning.

First, when you cut your lumber, you should sweep the sawdust off of both sides.  This prevents a lot of molding and potential rotting.  Sweeping the sawdust off and stacking with stickers is necessary within 1 to 3 days max to prevent blue stain and molding.

Next, use some of the flitches to cut stickers.  Mine are 1" x 1" but you can make them according to other's recommendations if you prefer.  At a minimum, one sticker per every 2 feet.

Third, build yourself consistent pallets.  Mine are 12' long for softwoods as I have mostly pine.  For hardwoods, I made my pallets 8' long.  I only made my pallets 3' wide because of the limitations of my tractor's forks.  So the 12' pallets require 7 stickers per row of boards, 5 stickers for 8' pallets.

You have to calculate how much your tractor or forklift can lift and move.  I was limited to 1800 pounds per pallet so I had to calculate how many boards and rows I could put on a pallet.  An example is I could put 9 - 2" x 4"'s per row and could stack only 6 to 7 rows high before my pallet weight was met.  I stack the pallets up to 9' high.  I have also learned to "cheat" when I am short of pallets by using 1" x 2" stickers to create space for the forks to set another  pallet full of wood on a single pallet.  It works well but you have to watch that your boards and stickers are aligned when stacking them high.

Next, you need some type of shelter or cover over your wood so it won't be damaged by the weather.  I opted to build a drying house (20' x 40' x 12' high) with a concrete floor (see picture below).  

Down here, I don't get a lot of wind because we are in a bowl with tall trees all around us but we get enough air movement that the wood drys pretty well and during certain times of the year, pretty quickly.  Get yourself a moisture meter with prongs as they will give you more accurate readings.  I can get the moisture down to 7-12% air drying.  

Generally, softwoods like pine take anywhere from 30 to 120 days to dry 1 inch and 2 inch materials.  Hardwoods are anywhere from 90 days to a year depending on the wood and thickness.

Make sure rain or snow can't coat the edges of the boards.  If you are cutting cants or cookies to pre-dry before re-sawing, or any larger dimension lumber (4" x 4" on up), paint the ends with Anchor Seal to limit splitting.

Once my pine lumber is dry enough, I size the boards to length, plane them where necessary, and grade them. I will then stack the boards on pallets without the stickers, band them together, and wrap them in plastic sheet until they are used.  For harwoods, I will thickness plane them and stack them on pallets, band them together and then wrap them in plastic.  In the future I am going to have an indoor storage room for my hardwoods so they will be stacked in there without the banding and plastic wrap.

Hopefully this will give you some ideas and help you build a great drying and storage strategy.



 



 

Here is how my sized and graded lumber is stacked.



 

[Old Greenhorn]

Well cool, I get to put a book under your Christmas tree ;D
Air Drying of Lumber

ANd now you have put one under mine also. Lots of good reading there. Thanks Don!
@Jeemy all those questions you've asked have been answered here more than once and with various points of view, applications, and geographical locations. There is a lot of information already here to read. Do some simple searchs for your specifics, but when you exhaust that start working your way through the various threads. There are also resources such as the fine one that Don just gave you (and I) to start you out with the proper basic knowledge. It's pretty much all here. 

[GeneWengert-WoodDoc]

DRYING  HARDWOOD LUMBER has a section on air drying.  This book also has some background on why we do various procedures with various species...scientific reasons made practical.  AIR DRYING OF LUMBER has many pictures of proper air drying techniques.

Both books are out of print, but can be downloaded off the Internet.  If you take the address of the download to a copy place like Kinkos or the UPS store, they will copy and spiral bind the copy for you so you have a more permanent copy.

[Nebraska]

@Don p, Thanks as well for the book it is now tucked away I will read it as well.

[Don P]

It's still Christmas, here's a couple more.
This is the one Gene mentioned, and wrote sections of;
Drying Hardwood Lumber

Another, McMillan, Wengert;
Drying Eastern Hardwood Lumber

[jemmy]

Thank you all for the wealth of info, time for me to get busy!!!! 

[Randy88]

We made extra pallets to stack lumber on, then screwed old shed tin to them and call them roofs for the lumber stacked outside.     The pallet idea with tin screwed to them serve two purposes, one they are cheap to build out of lumber you saw and second, they are heavy enough to keep the tin on the pile in windy weather, a huge benefit after all the years of handling tin and trying to keep on the piles as individual sheets, also make handling them easy with a skid loader or tractor loader.

When we stacked on dirt, [now we stack lumber on concrete slabs] we'd first lay down junk boards, then stack concrete blocks on those junk boards, several layers high, then lay junk cants down on top of the concrete blocks and then set the pallets of lumber on them, helps to keep the moisture from going up through the stack of concrete blocks and into the lumber pile.   Once rotten, we'd throw away the junk cants and find the next batch to use.   

Used barn tin on auction, usually a few bucks a sheet, color really didn't matter to us much, the kids liked the array of different colors though for some reason, looked unique I guess.