Storing fresh cut wood

Dan Birnbaum

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31
Location
Frisco TX
A neighbor of mine is taking down a hackberry tree this weekend and I have offered to take a few limbs off his hands.

How should I treat the exposed ends to prevent cracking while it dries? Plain old paint?

Thanks!
-dan
 
Latex paint is sorta OK. Anchorseal is best. Do take more than a couple branches. Get all you can. Hackberry is a pretty wood that often takes a deep glowing finish with chatoyance. Turns nicely too.
 
hackberry

dont know about the turning, but i have used some for drawer frts and doors the heart wood is very nice stuff, and the sap wood is nice and white. if you can get some of it cut into lumber go for it.. i was told it was just paint wood but after i found out differnt i had waited to long.. its got alot of character and is alot like buternut in the heart areas,, nice stuff and wont turn it down again. cuts and sands great. and like frank said anchorseal is good to seal it with but have used latex paint as well both wil work just takes bit more paint
 
If you can get the trunk wood, you will be better off, as the limbs can have a lot of stress built up in them, which can lead to cracks and or a lot of warping and twisting.

Seal the ends up right quick, as Frank said, Anchor seal, or some sort of "Green Wood Sealer" is best, Latex paint is OK, I use normal PVA glue (white glue) thinned, 1/3 water to 2/3 glue, and put on several coats, works OK as well.

Good luck, take pictures! :wave:
 
I have just melted plan old wax on the ends in the past seems to work quite well . Better than paint IMO. I have not tried the anchor seal or the likes as of yet.
 
Dan...

Couple of things:

I agree with Stu, if you can get trunk wood it's more desirable because it's more likely to be free of reaction wood, but take whatever you can handle. The price is right. If you do get both main stem and limbs, mark them somehow because a year from now you won't remember which is which (at my age tomorrow might be too long). Even reaction wood is fine for small projects like wine stoppers, pens, etc. The main stem may or may not have reaction wood (depends on whether it grew straight up or at an angle), but the limbs are guaranteed to have it. Not a big deal, as long as you know what you are dealing with.

Sealing the ends; think of a piece of wood as a bundle of soda straws...openings at the ends, solid along the sides. Close enough. Intuitively you can see that moisture escapes more quickly through the ends than through the sides, although with a piece of wood as opposed to a soda straw it actually does escape through the sides as well. The idea with end-coating is to slow moisture escape through that exit so it more closely matches moisture escape through the sides. So plug those end openings. It really doesn't matter much what you use as long as it will adhere to wet wood and it seals. Why care about this? Green wood contains moisture in two states: free and bound. My favorite analogy is a kitchen sponge. Dip it in water so it's sopping. It now contains bound water and free water.The bound water is in the walls of the cells, the free water is within the cell cavities. Wring it out as strenuously as you can...it's still moist. You have gotten rid of the free water and are left with the bound water. With wood this is called the Fibre Saturation Point. Regardless of species, this occurs at about 32% moisture content. Free water escapes first...intuitively makes sense. As long as the cells are at or above FSP no dimensional changes occur. Wood only starts to shrink when it begins to lose bound water. Now if the free water is allowed to escape through the ends faster than free water elsewhere is migrating out, the ends reach FSP first. Then the ends begin to shrink, but the rest of the log (boards) don't. Checking.

Cheers.
 
I'll be honest with you, I am not a big fan of painting the ends of the boards, either with anchorseal, paint or whatever. In my experience, I have never seen a depreciable amount of checking in doing so. I have tried it with both products several times and the checking still occurs. There are better ways to spend your time in money on preventing checking...in my opinion anyway.

What I have seen that greatly reduces checking, is proper stickering. When you put your boards on stickers, make sure the first few inches are supported by a sticker. In pile after pile of lumber,I found checking started at the end of the board and always stopped at the first sticker. If your first sticker is six inches in, you are going to lose six inches of lumber. If you run your sticker right out to the end, say an inch from the end, then you will only lose an inch or so of lumber. What I like to do, is double sticker the ends of my lumber. That is put a sticker right on the very end of the board, then put another sticker 6 inches in or so. That just helps keep the stack nice and level, and supports the end of the board for less checking.

By taking the time to properly stack your lumber, you will not only prevent checking losses, you will also prevent losses in warp, twist, bug infestation and other losses. Here is a link to get you started, just don't look at the picture too hard. Its actually drawn wrong as it shows the first stickers being 6 inches in or so.

http://www.railroadmachinist.com/Wood-Drying-One.html
 
Travis said, "There are better ways to spend your time in money on preventing checking...in my opinion anyway."
Unless you do it my way. I convinced my wife (don't ask me how) that Anchorsealing the ends of the hunks of a large tree I once cut up was fun. She spent the day painting those ends. I think I used a sorta Tom Sawyer fence painting psychology. Somehow, I don't think I'll get away with it again.

Chuck, Anchorseal is a water soluable paraffin wax. Don't ask me how they do it. But it works fine. BTW, if you order a five gallon bucket, the shipping is free.

Stu, most of the wood sealing products on the market are really Anchorseal under different labels and at considerably higher prices.

I'm a fan of the product. It keeps well as long as you don't let it freeze.
Available from https://www.uccoatings.com/
 
Travis, sealing the ends of lumber, pieces of wood that are say 8' long, however wide and 2" thick is one thing, but sealing the end grain on chunks destined to become bowl blanks is a whole nuther animal.

:wave:
 
Travis, sealing the ends of lumber, pieces of wood that are say 8' long, however wide and 2" thick is one thing, but sealing the end grain on chunks destined to become bowl blanks is a whole nuther animal.

:wave:

You may be right, I am not a turner so I really don't know about that. I know I have sawed plenty of lumber and did quite a few tests to see if paint/anchorseal made a difference. My tests showed it didn't.

I just don't see how a product, applied a few mills thick, would seal a logs ends. First of all, the second your saw gets taken from the wood, the wood begins to dry. Unless its down pouring rain, then those few thousands of an inch that anchorseal or paint would seal, would already have drying fissures in. And even at that, its making the assumption that a chainsaw makes a perfect cut. It doesn't.

A chainsaw is a combination between ripping and shearing. If you ever cut your leg with a chainsaw you know the saw tears out flesh. It also tears out wood fibers. There is no way anchorseal is going to seal the ends. No way. What looks like a nice smooth cut on the end of a log is actually very jagged under a microscope. Those straws that were talked about before (wood fibers) are not nice and cleanly cut, they are ripped, pulled, torn, fractured and severed in multiple ways by the chainsaw chain. A bit of paint a few mils thick is not going to stop much moisture from escaping and thus causing checking on the ends of your boards.

As I said, I have done the tests numerous times and the results are the same...end checks with or without Anchorseal or paint. Myself I think Anchorseal and Latex Paint is one of those things that gets presented to woodworkers, people buy into the theory, then swear by it and swear at anyone that does not use it.

I would think turners who wanted to salvage as much of the wood as they can, would buy these hand held cellophane wrappers that everyone is using these days. You know the industrial syran wrap type things for bundling packages and is used to keep boards in a stack from falling apart. I would think wrapping your turning blanks in that would do far more good then a few mils of anchorseal coating the ends of the log. :dunno::dunno:
 
Travis said, "There are better ways to spend your time in money on preventing checking...in my opinion anyway."
Unless you do it my way. I convinced my wife (don't ask me how) that Anchorsealing the ends of the hunks of a large tree I once cut up was fun. She spent the day painting those ends. I think I used a sorta Tom Sawyer fence painting psychology. Somehow, I don't think I'll get away with it again.

Chuck, Anchorseal is a water soluable paraffin wax. Don't ask me how they do it. But it works fine. BTW, if you order a five gallon bucket, the shipping is free.

Stu, most of the wood sealing products on the market are really Anchorseal under different labels and at considerably higher prices.

I'm a fan of the product. It keeps well as long as you don't let it freeze.
Available from https://www.uccoatings.com/
Frank, the shipping from UC Coatings is included in the total [price, but it's not free. Try plugging in different zip codes on their order page and you'll see what I mean. If I lived in the 10101 zip code, 5 gallons would cost me $57. Out here on the left coast though, that same bucket of goo will cost me $72.

I ended up ordering my 5 gallons from Craft Supplies USA. Their price was a bit lower by the time I included shipping. (In fact, they shipped the end sealer free, but charged me $5 or $6 shipping on the pepper mill parts I ordered at the same time.) :dunno:
 
Travis, I think you will lose this debate. The coating, like anchorseal does coat and seal even rough ends. Just slop it on good. Does what it is supposed to do.

Vaughn, those U.C. Coatings fellers is sure sneaky.
 
Frank it would have to at that price. I figure it costs me around 28 a cents a board foot to saw a log into lumber. If Anchorseal costs 57 bucks for a 5 gallon pail, that would have to equate to 190 board feet of lumber it would have to save me. That is a whole lot boards as end checking doesn't get much further then a few inches if stickered right.

If the average board is say six inches wide, and say the end checking goes to 3 inches on each end, that is 36 square inches per board. Now 190 feet of lumber put into square inches equals 27,360 square inches you would have to lose to pay for that 5 gallon of anchorseal. Divide that by 36 square inches and that gives you the number of boards that 5 gallon of anchorseal would have to cover if it was indeed 100% effective. The grand total is 760 boards.

Could 5 gallons of Anchorseal seal up 760 boards? Probably but I am guessing not a lot more. That makes the whole deal...in financial terms a wash, or even-steven, and that is also assuming Anchorseal is 100% effective! You and I both know its some checking still occurs on some boards.

Now in practicality terms, its a complete waste of time. 190 board feet would be the equivalent of a 16 inch diameter log, sixteen feet long...pretty darn easy to get. (International Log Rule Scale) Since I average 500 board feet of lumber harvested per hour with my little tractor, by the time I sloshed log ends with Anchorseal, I could go in the woods, harvest 500 board feet of lumber, haul it back out and still be 310 feet ahead of the game.

Perhaps if I was trying to protect the ends of my prized Birds Eye Ash, I would anchorseal the ever living poo out of them in the hopes that it would work, but for run of the mill lumber like Maple, Ash, Oak, Cherry or Yellow Birch...its far easier to cut an extra tree then mess with the stuff.

Sorry, but the numbers just don't add up to make the product viable. Maybe that's why there is no commercial mill that I know of (our sawmills included) that use the stuff.
 
Travis, I think you will lose this debate. The coating, like anchorseal does coat and seal even rough ends. Just slop it on good. Does what it is supposed to do.

Vaughn, those U.C. Coatings fellers is sure sneaky.

I have come down on the coating side of this debate myself. I mill and sticker/air dry several thousand bd ft a year, and although I don't coat ends of most logs, for special stuff I do because I found that it does truly work. With oak and cherry, I lose about 3/4 to 1 inch of checking at the end of most uncoated boards. That is acceptable loss for me in most cases. But when I do coat the ends, there is almost NO checking... zip. Latest Sawmill & Woodlot mag talks about sealing log ends, and their tests showed that a THIN coating on the end of the log, anchorseal, paint, whatever, did relatively little to seal the end, but a thicker coating did. I've noticed the same thing when I coat small pieces I'm drying with regular wax. I melt a pot of it, and simply dip the end of the piece in the wax. I noticed though, that when I dipped twice or made a thick coating, it did a much better job with no checking, and a little quick dip, just a light coating often checked anyway.
 
You may be right, I am not a turner so I really don't know about that...........

You are correct Travis, you are not a turner and you don't know about sealing up turning blanks.

With sealing the end grain, what is desired is not a perfect seal, what is desired and what you get is to slow the rate of moisture loss on the end grain to something close the moisture loss on the side grain. No Saran wrap needed. :wave:
 
I'm really enjoying this discussion, guys. Thank you for all the detailed replies. :thumb:

Back to my original question... it looks like I'm going to be able to secure the trunk (about 14" diameter, 8' long) and I was going to just seal the ends and let it dry in the shop.

Should I go ahead and cut it into boards now or wait until I'm ready to use it? I figured I would let it dry at least 6 months.
 
If you are planning on slabbing it into boards, then do it as soon as you can, and sticker it to dry, waiting will not help really, plus, if you can slab it outside somewhere, it is, of course better.

Make darn sure that if you are going to slab it, you have the place where you are going to keep it, for a year or two, ready to go, and you have more than enough stickers to do the job.

Some where out of direct sunlight, but an area that gets good air circulation is best, covered is good too, but you can build your own covers as well.

Good luck!:wave:
 
Wow, 14 inch by 8 ft sawlog. Good catch. That will be heavy...be prepared for that.

Stuart is right. Mill it now. It will dry faster and more evenly. Besides, milling green wood is much easier than milling dried wood. Although the boards will be heavier because they're wet, the blade will go through them easier. I'll underline having enough stickers...easy to underestimate this. They must be stickered.

One other recommendation: don't mill every board the same thickness (ie, all 1 inchers). Mill a 2", a 3"...that way if you do something like build a small table, etc, you'll have some thick stock for legs without having to glue up. Try to prepare in advance for the uses you'll put it to. Also allow for dimensioning after it's dry. By the time the moisture content is down to something usable a board milled to 1" will be less than that. And it will be rough-sawn and probably not perfectly straight, so it will have to be jointed and planed which will reduce it further.

Good luck with it. If you weren't so far away I'd take it off your hands and save you all that work.:)

Cheers.
 
One other recommendation: don't mill every board the same thickness (ie, all 1 inchers). Mill a 2", a 3"...that way if you do something like build a small table, etc, you'll have some thick stock for legs without having to glue up. Try to prepare in advance for the uses you'll put it to. Also allow for dimensioning after it's dry. By the time the moisture content is down to something usable a board milled to 1" will be less than that. And it will be rough-sawn and probably not perfectly straight, so it will have to be jointed and planed which will reduce it further.

Very good advice... mill it now, as it will take a VERY long time to lose that moisture if you keep the log intact. I've milled logs that have been dead many years, and the milled boards were still full of water. I too try and mill to what the boards will be used for. But that's hard to do if you mill as much as I do, so then mill a variety of sizes. If I want to end up with 3/4 " S4S, I mill 1 1/8 boards. If I want 1 1/4 stock for table legs, I start with 1 1/2 or 1 5/8. Depending on the species, and whether they are flatsawn, riftsawn or quartersawn, they will shrink 1/8 or so just getting down to 15-20% MC (moisture content) outside air drying, and then a little more down in the shop getting down to 8-10% MC especially in the dry winter months. Riftsawn and quartersawn will shrink/twist the least. That leaves you with a inch of RARELY dead flat lumber to take down to 3/4 on the jointer and planer. With an inch to play with, relatively slight twist can be taken out. Some wood twists less than others, and thus if I saw mostly riftsawn or quartersawn oak for example that has few knots or defects, I can get away with milling just 1 inch and still get 3/4 S4S, but that is pushing it. You have to have a really premium saw log to get away with that. As Stu said, keep the stickered pile out of direct Sun, and away from strong direct drying wind. The most important time is the first few weeks after milling. You don't want the outside of those boards to dry too fast, as the insides will still be very wet, and stress builds up in the board leading to defects down the road. You will be running that board through the table saw and it will twist up like a pretzel and bind as you run it through. Kickback... burned edges... no fun.
 
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