In Europe they used to leave the logs in a pond before cutting them for a time, that way the sugars and starches in the wood get dissolved. That reduces the warping by quite a lot.

Thank You for your honesty in such a practical application. All homesteaders can benefit from such knowledge!

Your honest approach to YouTubing is refreshing. I work with wood as an amateur furniture maker in rainy England and crooked planks are always a problem here, even store bought planed timber is usually warped from poor warehouse storage, drives me nuts that they can get away with selling it like that. Will be interesting to know how your experiments turn out.

So glad I found your channel. I live near a locust only lumber yard, the off cuts are super handy around here.

It's common to make assumptions and predictions. The only way to know is to experiment. But also, what may work for those few pine boards may not be the same for large lots, or other species. Attempt, and learn. Intelligent approach to find a solution to a problem.

looking forward to the update. Thanks.

I have a Woodmizer LT-40 and saw quite a bit of southern yellow pine as well as hardwoods. If you would build yourself a pallet the length of the boards you are cutting with supports for the wood every 1 to 2 feet depending on the wood species, stack and sticker your lumber and then band your pallets with ratchet straps they will air dry and remain straight. Just remember to keep your ratchet straps tight and check them weekly. As the lumber dries and shrinks it is imperative to keep the straps tight. Keep your pallets out of the sun when drying and cover the tops to prevent water from rain soaking the boards again. You will get better results.

Awesome video! Looking forward to the results

The first KZfaq channel NOT devoted to instant gratification. ;) fortunately for me, this update was from three months ago, and there may be an instant result… lol (laughing at myself)

I love the update man , looking forward to the end results

That mold is also called "Blue Johning" or Blue John. Many inspectors will make you remove blue johned lumber in interiors. Something you can look out for is that one board you held up and said "just look at this" .. I saw that a knot or limb went all the way across the board in both places where it was bucked and warped(that'll do it every time) A really time consuming method but effective in limiting warping is quarter sawing. But like I said, it's labor intensive and wastes a lot of lumber. It does make beautiful grain or tiger stripe lumber., common in guitar making and very desirable in certain applications. I do like your approach, simple and to the point.

Boy, that stuff grew quickly!

I have screwed some boards together with some deck screws and it helps.

In my experience, if weighted while air drying, once dry, they will stay flat unless they are not secured or primed and painted when the relative humidity rises. Therefore, boards installed inside normally only require a few finish nails, while exterior use may require screws. I have seen a sidewall where many of the 8d galv. nails had backed out and fallen on the ground within ten years!

I haven’t watched the end yet but what you’re doing is a low temperature “steam bend”. It should dry straight. “Silo boards” (made to form circles) are the fault of poor milling and this might be a good rescue trick. Kiln drying kills wood destroying insects but moisture starts entering the dry wood as soon as it leaves the kiln. Without keeping it snickered and clamped down, warping is going to happen. Great content.

I just found your channel and am really enjoying the content. Not sure when summer ends in your world, but I’ve subscribed and turned on notifications so I look forward to finding out how this turns out. Keep up the great work!

Epic KZfaqr. Perfect content.

Nice Pulp Fiction quote there 😊

I'm so glad you're following up on this! But I wish it had come about a year sooner; I was struggling mightily to try to straighten out some boards last month, with no luck

Sticking and bundling bent/warped planks then thoroughly soaking the wood has always worked well for me. .

Looking forward to seeing how this pans out. Couldn't agree more with your comment in your previous video about memes. I just find them hugely annoying, thanks for not using them 😊👍

Smart idea.

Years sgo I layed a green oak floor. We. Soaked the boards in diluted polyglycol snti freeze. The antifreeze replacing the water in the wood cells stops the cells from drying out. We had minimal splitting and shrinkage.

This will be an interesting experiment for sure. I think it will be a lost cause as the boards likely have uneven stresses and tension in them. That is what is making them twist and warp. Looking forwards to the results.

love to see the result of the experiment

Looking forward to it

There is very little you can do because warping is dependent upon the density of certain areas inside soft wood, like knots and the heart of a log. The softer areas acts like a sponge and expand when wet, conforming to the original shape, while the denser parts take longer to absorb water and stays solid longer with more resin content. Then when drying, the softer wood expands away from the denser wood, opening up so to speak

Who says that you can't teach an old dog new tricks. This old dog learns something new everyday

I would try sealing the end fibers so that the drying rate would be the same over the length. Maybe plastic pallet wrap or some kind of sealant.

If you ever do this experiment again, or decide to soak them again after this stage of the experiment, I'd be really interested in knowing how much longer/wider they are after soaking. The expansion amount would be a good indicator of how/if you can use them when still wet on a project and how it might affect the project as they dry out and contract.

Please do a follow-up . Would love to know the results .

Interesting experiment and good entertainment as well. I'll subscribe so I can see the results and check out some of your other videos..

Years ago when lumber was cut it was put in rivers for quite some time to start the seasoning process

When I buy lumber that is sort of wet and do not use it for a few days, I put a cinderblock on each end and another lengthwise in the middle. Let them sit for a week or two to dry out, and they stay flat.

Will this work for 2x4s

The first 12 or so years of most conifers are quite rebellious. Then they straighten out and stiffen. It's usually twisted leftwards a lot to be able to react with sideways fiber pressure to push straight. For Norwegian Spruce and Pine we want that youth wood smaller than 2 inches in diameter, and may remove it for some applications.

I noticed when you were laying the boards out while they were wet if you look at the ingrain pattern some of it you have Heartwood and you need to cut the hardwood out and you might be able to salvage some of the outer strips

Ur tone and way u do ur videos remind me of Merlin Perkins of Wild Kindom as when I was a kid

After a week and a half you have never changed, I guess you will look exactly the same after 10 years .

Hi . The old boys said if you get say 40 or 100 2x4x8 culled lumber and band the heck out of it and just dump the lift in the pond it will be good to work with just nail it down fast . LOL Always wondered if it would work .

In the words of Monty Python; "Nail them up I say, nail some sense into them"! 🤣 Nailing wood into position and/or applying paint to seal them is about the only thing you can do to prevent wood warping.

I've heard that steam will release the inner tension of the wood. This was in reference to bowl turning, the purpose being to reduce the incidence of the bowl splitting after being turned. The bowls would be rough cut then steamed at 1 hour per 1/4 inch of thickness. Then the bowls would rest for a year before the final finish turning. So steam might work on your lumber as well.

I sticker and air dry a lot of bowrds. If it is lumber I care about, I buy some Home Depot ratchet straps and strap them down tightly. I've got some walnut, white oak and cherry I did a while ago and it seems better than piling more boards on top.

_I caught that Pulp Fiction reference_ 😂

Adirondack lumber never warps, but I have been told to sticker/stack on a level surface using a straight 2x what ever top and bottom the use ratchet straps to add pressure. I've never had to try it but "I'm told" 😏 actually we cut it and sell it green, alleviates the warping 😊

4" ratchet straps around the stickers, I dried birch straight. Just keep the tension up.

Have you done an update video on this yet? I didnt see it when i looked

If you dont have clamps, you can add the use of ropes to your "weighting". "Round the rope aroung the outgoing streossel wood between the layers of" crooked" wood. Bind it up on one side deep down. Go over the pile and stretch the rope on th bottom stroer. Repeat for every stroe row.

Looks as crooked as some tamarack I cut to build a deck on my house. Had to do a lot of prying and screws to straighten everything up. It will be interesting to see how your lumber dries. Sometimes I use ratchet straps to keep my piles straight, not sure if it helps or not though. Another interesting video.

When cutting (depending on the tree) a quarter or rift sawn will limit twisting a lot!

have you tried simply bar clamping the four logs together when theyre straight and wet, wouldn't that be easier and less pain then stacking all that wood? That being said if you needed to move it i guess its perfect

I have a bed with wooden slats that are rounded/warped not flat. The slats are permanently in the steel part of the bed. Are there any solutions to make the slates flat & save the bed. I even thought of putting plywood over them. 😏 Thanks

Will be watching for the final results. I like the spring you have there. Did you block that up or was there a old water mill there ? Thanks

It'll work

I think they will dry straight, but once the humidity changes, they will quickly return to warped. Coating them in paint or sealer might keep them straight or straiter.

Beautiful property! Where are you located?

For me ill use these in small lenth or ...as fire wood. It depend a lot what kind of wood . By exemple Chestnut or cedar stay straight, some others are catastrophic

Hmm... perhaps heat them to bit over 170°C or 338°F and force them flat under weight or some other system. Then let them cool there. That's the temperature which is needed to bend wood, I guess it liquefies the lignin. To heat them up.... well, some kind of "oven" is needed.

The suspense is killing me 😁

Please do a final after putting the boards under all the slash pile of slash

Just so you know, using wire which you twist together to generate compressive force, works much better than simple weight.

I bought some kiln dried tounge & groove pine from a timber yard here in the U.K. Unfortunately It dried out properly once it was installed on my bedroom floor. :( what a mess. I think selling it overrides the need to dry it properly. Modern times.

I don't think you can do much to correct these boards, but what I think you can do is to avoid creating boards which bend like this. I think you could avoid creating board like this by cutting the lock after the log has already tried out. This way the boards you cut are already dry so they can't bend due to drying since they are already dry.

You want your boards to straighten out? How about trying some tough love? Send em to Boot Camp For Boards. Make them get up early and work for a living.

Delivered by Lowes?

Cook 'em straith, cool 'em straith, dry 'em straith and they be straith

My experience get straight boards to begin with. Sure if everything else is straight and strong you can nail them boards to a fence or wall and straighten them while they’re in the fence or wall.

Does it help if the log is dried before cutting it into boards?

I don’t see a follow up video of the results. I’m invested. What happened and what did you learn? Thanks

The result in about 4 months. They came out pretty good (not perfect). The title is "Easy Way to Straighten Lumber After Drying UPDATE"

Ponderosa pine, or yellow pine, or bull pine makes the worst lumber ever. There is a reason it isn’t used much. It always twists when dry. I would like to see this experiment with lodgepole are white pine.

If you are experimenting. I would take one of those boards and cut it while it's wet. Cut them into quarter lengths then let them dry and see which pieces stay straight.

How about hanging them vertically to dry, with heavy weights bolted on to the bottom? Like, I don't know, 50kg or smething. It would be interesting to see what happens, at least.

2:15 ooh nice! Organic!!! 😅

Build a rack. That way you can hold the bottom, sides and squeeze down the top with 2x4. Leave until dry.

I don’t see an update on this. But this is basically what we’ve always done. Take our twisted boards, spay them with an antifungle like stuff, and let them get rained on and dry out until next year. The pile would get shuffled as we pulled them off the bottom in various ways until we got a forklift and made that so much easier. Most stayed straight. Some did not and we just re soaked them in a pond from our spring run off, pulled them a day or two later and cut different size holes in the board acording to what we needed them for sometimes just drilling holes was good and we used those right away. Other times we would cut hold 1/2 to 3/4 of the width of the board. We removed the cut outs and dried them separately. Then as the boards slowly dried we reinserted the cut outs and glued them in. They stayed straight without needing to be nailed down. Oh, I was a child 40ish years ago. My father did all this and I helped, but I never learned what all the things he did or used was called. The anti-fungal was home made. The glue was made just down the road. The way he cut them and reinserted them wasn’t always 90 degrees. That was the general rule, but he twisted them so they’d look the best they could. The glue was odd, it took days to dry. It soaked into the wet wood but not the dry so much. It changed color of the wet wood, but then replaning and stain hid that perfectly. Anyway, he died so I can’t ask. He taught buy showing. I learned next to nothing as I have to words to go with it all. When I evently statered asking he didn’t always know the words. And this is the story as to why I’m not a wood working of any kind, lol… 😅

Wood is bent by steaming. Common practice in wooden airplane construction and they stay bent! Wing ribs are a perfect example. If have straightened wood by soaking and apply twist or torque in the opposite direction while the wood is wet. Experience tells you how much twist to add. Two sticks, clamps and a surface to hold the boards secure, then leave to dry. Not corrected enough? Wet boards again and add more weight to to the ends of the boards that are clamped to the twisted lumber.

What ur doing seems to be the same thing as putting all the boards in one stack and then holding them together with either 2 clamps or steel banding or lorry straps at each end. Ideally consecutive boards should have the 'wind' (twist) going in opposite directions ie flip some of them over before clamping/strapping/banding.This shd reduce the twisting and introduce an over-compensation which,when it recoils(literally!) a bit will help even more. I believe that the 'wind' is caused by the tree twisting during growth for some reason e.g. a neighbouring tree is felled and then this one moves towards the light. In traditional carpentry there is a rule for whether it's ok or not - if the twist follows the sun then good.If the twist is in the opposite direction then no good structurally. I think it's either called the 'left hand rule' or 'right hand rule'(depending on which hemisphere you live in) and by looking at the bark before felling(depending on the species,of course) you shd be able to spot the wrong-uns before you get your chainsaw out saving avoidable hassle

where is the next video?

So how did this work out? I cant find an update on the final results.

Weight should help considerably. Up to 250000 lbs of force is applied when using RFV kiln drying to equalize the stress in the wood as it dries

It looks like the warping is from them being milled incorrectly. The grain is going in two directions on the planks so they were slab cut and not cut properly with the grain of the wood.

Can I use a hose?

maybe ratchet straps over the top straight boards would be a good clamp?

I wonder if you could just screw the crooked lumber to the straight deck.

There's two types of warp caused in wood... grain bound, and resin bound. This is why rough cut lumber is cut larger than finish lumber, as they're trued up in finishing. Soaking can displace resin... but does NOTHING for grain binding. There's three ways to correct for warp that is grain bound: 1- for minor warping... after the wood has dried out, you can might be able to finish it to a smaller dimension 2- also for minor warping, you can soak the wood and hang it... but only if it's going to be used in a vertically supported application. When you put a load on it, it will try to return to it's natural twist 3- for serious warping, you can steam the wood and brace the twists out of it, allowing it to cure in the position you want. Obviously, this is labor intensive and expensive... so it's not something you would do with general purpose lumber. Hence why most people just throw kull boards away, or put them in the scrap pile for burning, making wedges, block and brace cuts, etc..

I need to find a creek

I suspect they may never dry straight/staigh-ter due to how the fibres in the tree were arranged during its growth.

Stack and space

I think they will dry straight and stay straight. UNLESS they were cut from limbs with allot of stress in them.

It's the same concept as steam bending wood, only slower.

Sticker stack and weights. Right off the mill.

That's why they sticker and band lumber.

Use them soon and you should be fine

Heat is the way to straighten boards. Heat them up and bend them back in to shape.

Any update?

Hey man you didn't get that stick out of there, that's going to bother me you need to get that stick out of there bro lol

My guess would be not enough weight, and they will be moldy. Good experiment but a lot less work if you just went and cut another tree and trashed those board, but I get it is just for a good experience. Great video idea!

In my experience weight is the answer but it takes lots & lots of weight. What you have there does not seem like enough

Dried, I'd glue them opposing bow and twist. They are thin boards, so making them thicker is useful. Really you can only keep them straight if making something that pins them down with screws.