Green Wood Bowl Turning Tutorial:
Part 4, Monitoring the Drying Process
Once you have prepared your wood
for drying, it is time to monitor its progression through the drying
cycle, so that you will be able to tell when it is time to finish
turning your project!
While monitoring the drying
process, you can choose to go as high tech or low tech as you
please. If you want to get to your project as soon as possible,
then you're going to need to closely monitor things. If you have
plenty of dried, unfinished projects, and aren't in any rush to get to
your next project, then you can just let the piece sit for a few
months until you are ready to get to work. This portion of the
tutorial (of course) is going to focus on those who need to get their
project as soon as possible.
To begin, you must understand
that the wood you are working with contains a moisture content within
that is struggling to maintain equilibrium with the moisture content
of its surroundings. If the wood is more highly saturated with
water than its environment, then it will lose water into that
environment Conversely, if the environment is more highly
saturated with water, it will push water back into the wood.
When you are drying your piece, you are trying to cause the moisture
content in the wood to be the same as the moisture content of the
environment that it is in.
When dealing with
"green" wood, you will most certainly find that the wood is
more highly saturated with water, thus causing the wood to lose
moisture. As this moisture is lost, the weight of that moisture
will be lost from the wood. THIS is the key to determining
whether or not your piece is dry enough to finish.
What you want to do is keep a
log of the weight of your drying wood. Every 3-4 days, the
roughed out blank should be weighed on a small, accurate scale, and
the measurement recorded in your log. Continue doing this until
you find that the weight of the blank has stabilized over the course
of at least 3 weighing sessions. If the blank has stopped
changing weight, then it has stopped changing moisture content!
Not very complicated.
Now...everything is dry...time
to finish up!
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