frustrated

[Ed451]

Ok, now I'm getting frustrated. I had some nice maple cut, sawed 2" + and kilned. I cut a few pieces yesterday to begin making a woodbox to go with my new fireplace insert. Well, the more I work the wood, the more frustrated I become. I finally got one flat face and 2 square edges, but the board was too wide to go through my bandsaw to be re-sawed into 1" stock. No problem, I ripped it down the middle, then re-sawed it on the band saw. Well, I started out with one straight board, now I have two bowed boards! From each half of the original board! As you can tell, I'm taking a break from woodworking for the rest of the evening; darn internal wood stresses! I don't mind the work, but someone please please tell me I am going about this process correctly?

Ed

 

[Frank D.]

Hi Ed,
Sorry to hear about your troubles. Was the wood dried by a professional? I've tried wood that was dried by an artisan (the price was right) and most of it had a lot of internal stresses, it was quite dangerous to cut on the tablesaw. It helps to work with boards as close to the finished thickness as possible. You could try taking off 1/2" from each side if the whole board is the same (or batch of boards), but that'll give you a lot of waste.
I'm sure someone will come along soon with a better solution. These things happen, it goes with the territory.

 

[Chris Knight]

Ed,
This is an altogether too frequent problem, generally caused by improper kilning, sometimes by the use of poor stock ("reaction wood" that has been under stress whilst growing). The former is much more likely, either is the fault of the wood supplier/kilner.

See here for an explanation http://sres.anu.edu.au/associated/fpt/d ... .case.html

The prong test described there is a useful guide as to whether it will happen.

Basically you can't rely on resawing all wood to get the thickness you want. Sometimes to have to take it down by thicknessing - removing equal amounts of wood from each side to balance the stresses.

 

[Ed451]

Thanks for the quick replies.

The kilning was done by an artisan, who also kilns his own lumber. He assured me that he cuts forks from sample pieces, and used a dehumidification kiln. It seems such a waste to plane large amounts from the outsides of a thick plank to get a thinner board. Maybe I just chose a bad board, I guess I'll find out as I use more of them. I did notice, however, that he usually uses 5/4 boards in his own work, which might help to explain problems with my thicker planks.

Ed