Today I present to you the drying methods that I use.
For amateurs like me, there are very few ways to obtain dry wood to work with.
The first method is to buy it dried in a sawmill or in specialized turning stores. For sawmills, species are very limited.
For my part, I am on the lookout for any wood that is different from the standards. You saw in my last creations, I used Catalpa and Plane tree. For this type of wood, you have to be in constant research and look everywhere.
Once you find wood, it is usually wet.
Don't dream, if you want to make your boards there will be no other method than putting them in a very ventilated place and waiting and waiting, for years. At an average of 1cm per year, you will have a 27mm tray usable after more than a year of drying (1cm per side). More than 2 years for a 40mm tray.
Without a special oven, there is no solution for the boards.
For woodturning, the parts are smaller and there are possibilities.
The best results are achieved with natural drying in the open air of the plots. But watch out for insects. There is also a precaution to take on the ends of logs or more generally in places which are prone to splitting. (at each end on a log). The best is to apply wood glue to the ends. This limits evaporation and end cracking.
I know that when you start out, you can neither afford to buy dry wood nor to wait for it to dry.
I'm going to show you the method I use when I'm impatient and want to use an essence that's not yet dry.
First of all, I never use a microwave, I tried more than 20 years ago, it was never satisfactory. The wood splits half the time, and it never recovers from excess temperature.
I only work with desiccant of the "Silicagel" type, you know those little bags that are found in boxes to protect against moisture.
Concerning safety, the product I use is not known to be toxic. This is the moisture revealing product on it that was with Cobalt in the past.
Today the humidity indicators are orange and are not toxic. you should obviously not ingest dissecant in quantity, this is easy to understand.
The success rate for this drying method is around 90% and all this in 24 hours per cm.
In this method, the wood dehumidifies at its own pace, without heat or steam.
We create an atmosphere with 0% humidity and the wood tries to balance with the exterior.
If the wood is short, do not hesitate to put wood glue on the wood at the end of the grain.
For this demonstration, I am going to turn a bowl in green wood, in a 250 year old oak tree that fell this summer after a strong storm.
I leave 10% of the diameter in thickness of the blanks to let the wood work during drying.
After drying, the blank is taken again to give it its final shape. It is also interesting to let the blank equilibrate for a few days in ambient air to be sure not to have any deformation afterwards.