keithy1959":8y5utjnf said:
Noted !!
100 mm X 125 mm X 1000 mm. (5"x 4" x Just over a yard) RK
As it's your intention to eventually make thinner boards (35 - 50 mm) I suggest ripping each piece now, either into two pieces ~60 mm thick or two pieces roughly 50 mm thick. You could do some pieces at one thickness and some at the other, or do the lot all at the same thickness. Both these thicknesses will be more than enough to yield anywhere between 35 - 50 mm final thickness.
Assuming, as you say, the wood is still green then the typical shrinkage allowance as the wood dries to something like either joinery or furniture grade moisture content is 10%, e.g., 60 mm thick green boards might lose up to roughly 6 mm of thickness - down to as little as perhaps 54 - 56 mm thick when dry.
Anyway, once boarded up then you should sticker up a pile of your boards in the accepted manner to dry. You can air dry it in an open sided but sheltered location, e.g., an open sided shed that encourages decent airflow, and here in the UK you can expect to get the wood down to perhaps 20% MC in such drying conditions, but frequently a bit wetter than this. That's still too wet for internal furniture, but dry enough for external artefacts such as picnic tables, garden gates and the like. However, ash is not generally a wood suitable for external use because it's not a durable species - it doesn't fare at all well exposed to the elements unless it's protected with a finish, e.g., yacht varnish, paint, etc all of which have to be maintained regularly. It's good for internal uses, but you'd need to acclimatise it for this purpose after air drying.
An acquaintance of mine that runs a timber yard reckons he can air dry 1" thick boards of ash to about 20%+ MC in six months or less. But when he dries wood he dries large piles of the material, and the weight of the upper boards helps reduce warp in those boards lower down in the pile. I'm guessing you have only a few pieces so you won't have a big pile to help maintain flatness, so you'd need to either weight down your pile with plenty of large heavy concrete blocks (for example) or invest in ratchet clamps to pull the stickered pile tight, and keep tightening the clamps as the drying wood shrinks.
Another guess on my part is that these pieces of 5" X 4" ash have the pith running pretty much up the centre of each suggesting they might be what's known in the timber conversion trade as boxed hearts. These are quite often cut out in the milling because they're unstable and liable significant distortion - they tend to go to relatively low level products. If that's the case, I'd be wary of following any advice I've given here.
Lastly, If this is all new to you your best bet might be, in the very near future, to undertake research into the milling and drying of timber, before committing yourself to anything - there's a lot of information out there if you know where to look for it. How important that research might be will depend upon how many fairly thick pieces of ash you're dealing with now, and perhaps what your future plans might be with regard to your involvement in sourcing, milling, and seasoning timber. Slainte.
