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In the workshop

I live and work in the Teifi valley, near Llandysul in West Wales, UK.  This is where I grew up.

 

My first woodworking began around 1999, when I started making some small battery-charging wind turbines, inspired by my cousin Pat, a trip to CAT, (where I bought the excellent 'Wind Power Workshop' by Hugh Piggott) and my DipHEd Electronics (I tend not to mention it!).  I carved wooden blades, from spruce, (I was told it was spruce anyway) using a drawknife, a Stanley RB10 plane and one of my great grandfathers' chisels.  That chisel (inscribed R. Knight) now has a split in the handle - I didn't know at the time that it wasn't designed to be used with a mallet!  I still use it daily (see photo down below).

 

 

Milling wood

I mill wood (convert it into planks), from trees or large branches that have either blown down, or have otherwise needed to be removed, using a portable chainsaw mill.  These fallen trees or large logs can be on a farm, an estate or in a garden - the portable mill can be taken to just about any place that can be accessed by foot - carrying the heavy planks back is the more difficult part.  The tree or log, could be freshly fallen that morning, or possibly a couple of years old and beginning to spalt, depending on the species and its environment. The milling is noisy, sweaty, dirty, arduous work, best done in the cooler months. There can be embedded nails, stones, fencing wire, or even (would probably tend to notice these) bicycles!

 

Sounds awful.

 

However, there can be considerable satisfaction at the end of the day, looking at a bunch of useful, pretty wooden planks, cut from a filthy looking log that was most likely going to rot where it lay or (more upsettingly) get chopped up into firewood. 

Of course, a damp log laying in the shade is a crucial habitat for woodland wildlife - but fortunately I don't get to do this to all the unloved logs in Wales! 

 

Tree Planting

Some of the trees that have been planted at Pantgwyn Uchaf can be seen here

 

Air-drying wood

The freshly milled planks of wood need to be dried before use, by allowing air to circulate around them and carry off the moisture. Freshly milled wood contains a lot of moisture, even if the tree or log has been sitting about for some time; which if brought into a home will quickly shrink, move, split and possibly fall to bits, probably in about that order.  Besides which, it doesn't plane nicely, won't take glue and rusts tools. 

 

This drying is accomplished by stacking the planks one upon another, out of the rain and sunlight, (under corrugated sheeting works well, so long as it doesn't obstruct air-flow) separating each plank with 'stickers', which are long, dry rectangular pieces of wood, about ¾ inches high, maybe an inch wide. I use softwood for mine, such as cheap construction pine. Damp stickers might give the wood 'sticker stain', something to avoid in light coloured woods, such as sycamore or holly.  The objective is to allow moisture to be removed, at a controlled rate, not too fast and not too quickly. Water evaporates much faster from the ends of the plank than it does from the other surfaces and will cause splits or 'checks' here, because the wood further in from the ends hasn't dried and shrunk at the same speed.  So, the ends of each plank can be coated to help retard the evaporation, which hopefully will reduce the extent of the splitting.  For this I use whatever is to hand, old half finished gloss paint, or maybe some cheap PVA, or past-its-best wood glue. Maybe a colourful mix of all of them! Personally, I'm usually not so fussy about it, since what I normally use the wood for, boxes etc, the last few inches from the plank will likely be cut-off regardless and used to help heat the workshop.  Certainly, thicker planks tend to be more inclined to split, than thinner ones do, because they need to be dried more gradually, which is more difficult to control when outside drying than it would be with a climate controlled kiln.

 

These planks of wood are going to take some considerable time to become dry drier.  Exactly how dry and how fast depends on the average relative humidity of the atmosphere, the wood species itself, its particular characteristics (fast grown timber from fertile, damp lowland habitat, will likely dry faster than slow grown, dense timber from unfertile, dry upland habitat) and the amount of airflow moving through the stacked planks.  There is an often quoted rule of thumb, which recommends a year 'in stick' for every inch thickness of hardwood, but again this is very much dependent on the variables mentioned above.  The inside of a piece of wood air-dried in Cardiff for instance, on the Atlantic side of the UK might reach an average Equilibrium Moisture Content or EMC of about 16%, whereas wood air-dried similarly in London, with a slightly lower annual average relative humidity, of around 77% might get down to an EMC of 15%. At least according to Cardiff historical weather data and London historical weather data ). 

 

I personally tend to consider 18% moisture content being as dry as my wood is ever likely to get outside, at the end of summer, protected from most rain, especially the notoriously reluctant to dry white oaks (our native oaks, Q.petraea and Q.robur, with their tyloses (see a scanning electron micrograph here).  My own moisture meter isn't accurate enough to reliably say otherwise and I'm not going to start oven-drying samples and weighing it on laboratory scales, to determine its exact moisture content - since I want to use it!

 

So, this 18%MC wood I have is still not dry enough to be used to make stuff that's going to go indoors - it needs to get dryer still, which means moving it into a place that is dryer than where it was outside, but not as dry as inside a centrally heated house, at least not in the winter, because that would be to great a step and the wood might surface check (little cracks on the surface).

 

Instead it is moved to wherever is the coolest part of the workshop, (preferably on the floor, furthest from the stove) where it sits, again stickered so as air can flow about it, looking all pretty and tempting, to dry some more, for another unspecified amount of time. 

 

When I do this, I write the date and weight on the planks (I use bathroom scales), plus maybe some other information, such as where the plank came from and what it is, especially if it's obscure and I'm likely to forget. (eg 21/9/09, 15lbs, Mrs Jones, Pontrhydfendigaid, Liriodendron Tulipifera).  I normally use some heavy abbreviation! 

Now, periodic weighings will show when the plank has reached its new EMC, this point being when two or more consecutive readings are the same.  When this happens, it isn't going to get any drier unless it is moved to yet another location, with a lower average relative humidity and generally, for me, this means a warmer location in the workshop.  In my case, this would be either up near the rafters in the workshop, or, at least in the summer months, the loft above the workshop where the sun heats the roof - caution! it can get really warm up there, and a low dewpoint on a sunny, frosty morning, will bring the relative humidity plummeting.  Despite this, in winter, it is normally on average warmer near the rafters in the workshop rather than the uninsulated loft, where at night heat quickly radiates away and leaves the relative humidity close to outside readings, normally getting towards 100% R/H, so that no drying takes place. 

 

Once again, after the unspecified amount of time, I weigh the planks and write this new weight and date, on the wood. 

When another two or more consecutive weighings remain the same - around about the same time that I've forgotten where the wood originally came from - the stuff is just about as dry as it's going to get, without resorting to a kiln. 

Doesn't hurt to give it a bit more time though.

 

Paring chisel

Making ash dowels.

Wooden wind turbine blade

Air drying wood outside.

After drying outside wood is moved into the loft.

at least it is in the Winter...

Wood drying, stickered, on the workshop floor...

waiting to go in the loft, or near the workshop rafters.

Wood drying from the workshop rafters.

This is the warmest, and driest part of the workshop.

An area under trees for spalting wood.

There is some ash, oak, sycamore and cherry