How Does Wood Dry?

When lumber is sawn from fresh cut logs, they hold an enormous amount of water, and need to be dried before using. Failure to dry your wood first can result in cracking, warping, mildew and bugs. Boards are primarily dried by stacking them with sticks, spaced every 16” or so, in such a way as to allow wind to move over their surface. The process of warm air moving through the stickered stacks of lumber is how wood is dried. First, we stack wood outside, to air-dry, as opposed to putting it directly into the kiln. This is because ideally you want to dry wood out as slowly as possible to avoid defects that come with rapid drying, such as checking and case-hardening, which weakens the wood. Lumber should be left to air-dry until it has reached a minimum moisture content (MC) of 20% or so. However, properly useable air-dry wood has an MC closer to 12%. But, once the boards have reached 20% MC, they are safe to move into the kiln. The dehumidification kiln replicates that same natural drying process of warm air moving over the stacks of lumber, but multiplies it. The kiln itself is simply a well-insulated room designed to retain much of the heat it generates. There are some fans in the ceiling and an industrial dehumidifier with a heater, which removes the water, drawn out of the lumber, from the room. This kiln process actually removes water from the cell walls of the wood, which is not possible through air-drying. The process also kills any bugs that may be present, which is what we call a sterilization cycle. All wood sold at a lumber yard goes through some kind of process like this before it’s sold.

How Do We Source Our Logs?

We get our logs from you! Most of our logs are from trees that have come down in a storm, or needed to be removed from a property for one reason or another. We don’t typically buy logs from larger logging companies, as we have been able to rely on a small local economy of arborists who bring logs to us for cash, rather than dumping them in a ditch or burning them. Relying on this community gives us a much wider range of species to deal with, which allows us to provide what we like to call Domestic Exotics!