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.

I screwed some wet pine to the joists in the basement for about a year took them down and made the frame for a screen door. works like a charm

you are a good KZfaqr. Don't worry about the grammar! you come across as a very honest dependable person. It's appreciated.

The speaking English segment got me to subscribe here. Great experimental series. Looking forward to more.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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)

looking forward to the update. Thanks.

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 love the update man , looking forward to the end results

Epic KZfaqr. Perfect 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!

My dad used to store a lot of wood, all sizes, all of it close to vertical, leaning against things. For decades. It all stayed straight. Now i have a lot, all different types and sizes, some old and thicker than 2"; all stored near vertical, and for many years, and it's all straight. Don't overload tree limbs, and remember your prevailing wind and the huge amount of strain a strong wind can put on limbs. Best to tie them off in bundles.

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

Boy, that stuff grew quickly!

Looking forward to it

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

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.

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

thanks for these videos

Not too sure why I watch any videos anymore as I need to go outside for fresh air and get the blood circulation moving better. I have a problem with Lymphoma, most likely the wrong word as its a infection and not cancer. I will be seventy five in oct and just got out of the hospital for a heart attack that came close to punching my ticket. I am not trying to whine or bore you with my life story but think I might add something to this challenge of yours. Central Alaska doesn't have a ton of variates in timber. We have some spruce but just what one is not in my brain. I did used to know as many things seem harder now for things I wish I remembered. Nice Birch, and up high elevations have some kind of pine. The timber for the most part is not big around/diameter and limbs clear to the butt of the tree. Where ever there is a lot of this spruce is mostly swampy bad ground to build on where the Birch is nice ground and since this part of alaska is known for excellent gardens as in record size pumpkins and cucumbers, just many great garden stuff. I was a mechanic/fabricator for the better parts of my life but hey when you needed something..... you made or sawed or just about anything it takes to have something decent to live in. "In our dreams" is heard when buying a new home, costs of living is out of control... sliding again about this topic. One of the most common trees found here is Cottonwood and it does get seriously large but is known for unstable building material. It will twist while sawing it, that and if its dry then forget even sawing it. That is probably thee hardest wood when dry to cut on any kind of sawmill or even saw a worm drive circle saw. I was up against time and needed some lumber for protecting valuables till spring so cut what I had .... and that was green Cottonwood timber. My buddy who is even older than me (this is about fourteen years ago) said... quote: when sawing it, get all of the wain off of the boards and then toss it in the pond behind your home. Leave it there for a few weeks to let the oils in that timber soak out. Oil floats on water so it made sense to me. Granted you still needed to drill a hole in a board if you wanted to nail it down but it came out straight as a string. Even in a hot summer month that wood stayed straight and never curled, twisted or even split on my old building. I did use some old motor oil after a year went by for the looks of the boards were a faded look I wasn't happy with considering my place was painted and looked nice to me. This is rough cut as owning a planer wasn't a option for me. My big brother who was nine months older than me... as I weighed about two forty and he weighed one sixty soaking wet. I use past tense as he passed away in 2019 from cancer. He was a builder if any of us had the sense to just do what we knew how to do. We used cottonwood beams in his airplane storage building. The main header on the face of the building was sixty feet long and we just cut the tree by squaring it up so was around sixteen inches thick/square. We did this because of snow load and also we were in a hurry and the lake being right there tossed every board in the lake and floated it to the place we parked that old taildragger of his. I do believe that plane was built in the thirties as many planes do go back in time here in alaska. That building is still standing after twenty years and built from mostly cottonwood. Now days we do not see much sunshine, rain and then more rain with a outbreak of snow at any month of the year. As for nails in this kind of wood, the rules never change .... best drill those holes as soon as possible or forget even trying it.

When you dry wood in a Kiln or just in a shaded pile you paint the ends with a water proof paint to stop the planks drying faster on the ends that tends to twist the wood. Wood is always stacked with spacers below and on top of each plank for even air flow.

I read in Fine Woodworking Magazine,years ago,to always paint end grain with a high solids paint if you air dry and then store lumber,using stickers to separate layers of the stack.Also to use some type of restraint system to restrict movement; ratchet straps , face nailing or stack weight etc. When ever I buy Hm Depot lumber I always paint end grain immediately and face nail boards in pairs siting the board preferential warping direction and face nailing them together in opposing directions. Works for me,but if you’re building a house buy kiln dried lumber, not from H Depot. Lol😊

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

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

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 😊👍

Nice Pulp Fiction quote there 😊

My milling mentor informed me that when cutting second growth redwood for instance all the viable branches were going to grow 😂to the outside of the grove. Branches sprouting toward the inside would soon be growing in shade and tree wouldn't waste energy on them. After a while the weight of those branches would pull on fibers towards the inside of grove and compress fibers on outside to balance the tree and have it grow straight. Sometimes the wood would warp as soon as you cut it. He recommended in my case because i was using a mobile dimensional saw with one big circular blade and two edger blades to locate the knots on top or better yet on bottom of log. This type of mill you don't rotate log while cutting it. Tension on fibers of log cause it to warp vertically parallel to longer face of board. For deck boards ( most of our redwood business ) that kinda warpage could be pryed straight with Japanese catspaw as you nailed it down. If you were using it for beams for exposed beam ceilings you could stack it with crown up and beams would straighten while drying.

Merci pour la video

Smart idea.

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.

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.

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.

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

I put some loblolly pine boards that had warped in the rain and they straightened out. Then I clamped them until they dried. When they dried while clamped down the cracked open and warped a little less. I cut them up in shorter pieces when I used them. It didn't work for me.

my uncle took home a truckload of large, old, wet logs, which had been in a river weir for decades. They were very heavy; we had to pump up the tires! After one year of drying they were so light, You could lift up one by hand alone! Dry without warping. Drying whole tree trunks usually makes them crack! One way to overcome that problem, I think, would be to cut off only a ring of bark around at the bottom, and let the whole tree stand and dry for one or two years vertically at its place. Then two years later cut down the pre-dryed tree! if that doesn't work perfectly enough then maybe drilling a long hole through the center of a trunk could help for non warp, non crack drying, esp very big, very old trees? The most valuable ones. Make good wood products, better than usual shabby Supermarket quality.

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.

Rachet ties might work when stickering them.

Maybe this is why you find better boards at lumber store if you dig down into the pile: The weight of the upper boards & more moisture retention. Any lumber I don't use right away, I store in my garage laid out on floor, stacked. It helps, but it takes up space.

Thnx

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

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

Laughed at the Pulp Fiction reference at 1:40.

Will do the job, no need to watch next video.

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.

love to see the result of the experiment

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

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.

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 😊

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.

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

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 .

_I caught that Pulp Fiction reference_ 😂

I think you are on it here. The person who mentioned getting rid of sugars is right on it. You really want to be rid of them they provide an easy start for all rot. An interesting point is the Japanese boil logs. My plan on a house I am building in the Philippinesiò is to star mill logs. You end up with wood like long cheese wedges. The wood is therefore vertical grain. This does not warp and accomodates varying moisture simply by becoming thicker or thinner. The wood cladding will not be parallel, but no matter. You simply cut notches where you meet a mounting beam. DON'T put them through a planer thicknesser. Only the front face needs to be flat. Watch this space.

The suspense is killing me 😁

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.

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.

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.

Would the solution be to let the log dry further before sawing?

Here in Maine we call those “CANOE BOARDS”.😂

Bolt or glue them together while straight to make 3x6s . Their random warping will compensate each other.

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.

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

Will this work for 2x4s

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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… 😅

Stickering didn't work for me but standing them straight up leaning against my building worked fine.

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.

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

It'll work

2:15 ooh nice! Organic!!! 😅

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.

What i normally do is soak them in warm water put them in a jig or flat surface with weight on them ,let them dry then they keep the shape

I want a live cam so we can watch the boards dry ;-)

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.

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

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

Beautiful property! Where are you located?

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..

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

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.

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.

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

"That's just what they done did" There. Fixed it. 1:35

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

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