Woodwork Ireland

Consumer Pricing

There’s a furniture and fancy housewares shop next door to my place of work. Until recently, they only sold white things - furniture painted white, white throws, white delph, white picture-frames, and so on. They changed hands a few months ago, and a few non-white items have now crept in. However, what caught my eye this morning was an ad for a special offer that said that with every purchase of a desk and chair, you also got a 110cm shelf, free. Normal price €125. I re-read it a few times, and thought it was rather bad phrasing, being as it had to be set of shelves for that price. And then I saw the shelf itself. One horizontal shelf, two end-pieces, rather ineptly painted white - it could really do with another coat. Price, €125. Clearly, web design is the wrong business to be in…

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Drying Timber

I was brought up in a woodwork shop, so there’s a lot of stuff that I know without thinking of it as knowledge. One of these seems to be how wood dries over time - I’ve seen a number of poeple asking about it on message boards and in magazines.

This isn’t really relevant for people working at the manufacturing level, who buy in all their timber in ready planks, nor for the DIY folks, who won’t have time or space to dry wood. However, for the amateur or small professional wood turner or wood carver, being able to go from fresh-cut logs to finished product is great. For those folks, here’s some information on what happens to wood as it dries.

A fair amount of the weight of fresh-cut timber is water. If you leave this in the log, or in planks, under cover and up off the ground, it will eventually dry, leaving you with harder, more brittle material. This is called air-drying (as opposed to kiln-drying).Air drying takes a long time - the usual recommendation is 1 year for every inch of diameter, with an extra year for anything over four inches. However, in the process, it tends to warp and split. In logs, the usual occurance is a split along the long axis as the wood contracts. Often, this is just at the end, but depending on the shape and internal structure of the timber, it may split at points along, or indeed all along the length.

Do excuse my hand-drawn diagrams here; they illustrate my points fairly well, I think:

Planks will usually warp rather than splitting, developing curves - usually in the short axis, or twists along the length.

To understand the way the wood warps, it’s best to use another diagram:

In this, you can see how a given plank will warp, depending on what part of the log it is from. You can see that the centre plank will warp least - although that’s not to say it won’t warp at all; it may well buckle in interesting ways - and the planks taken from between the top and middle will warp most. However, in the same diagram, you can see that a log cut in the middle will warp only a little, and in a fairly predictable manner. This is probably the best way for an amatuer to cut wood for drying, as it avoids splits and still leaves you with a decent chunk of timber - particularly important for carving and turning.

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