Robust wood
About a week ago on the OldTools e-mail list, there was a discussion about how well lumber would fare if it was stored out in the open, unprotected from the sun and rain, but with good air circulation (i.e. allowed to dry out, once it got wet).
The photos here are from my own little, unintentional experiment. The wood here is some sort of mystery softwood, grabbed from my wife's university about two years ago: the maintenance folks had cut down a tree and chainsawed the trunk into sections, and I grabbed one of the short (about a foot and a half) logs.
I'd stripped off the bark, and split it into sections to minimize splitting and checking. I didn't put anything (e.g. paint, beeswax) on the ends, so the end-checking is what it is. And because I didn't have a good place to put them, I just laid the pieces out in the open, in direct sunlight. They got rained upon; they suffered direct summer sun. And between rains, because they were suspended by some strips of wood (old tomato stakes?), they were allowed to dry out.
Occasionally I'd flip the pieces over.
Some fungus grew -- which I sometimes knocked off, and sometimes I didn't. It doesn't seem to have impacted the strength of the wood (we'll see for sure, once I process the pieces into dimensional lumber). Maybe I'll have some interesting spalting.
Anyhow: after two years of being out in the sun and rain -- unprotected, but with naturally-circulating air -- here's what it looks like (click if you want to enlarge)...
Some surface discoloration, but it seems to be entirely surface. I reckon if I remove the top 1/8'' of it (and I'd have to do that -- or more -- to turn it to dimensional lumber), it'll just look like regular softwood.
Some end-checking (I haven't investigated how far, but it doesn't look too bad), but there doesn't seem to be any splitting (beyond the initial splitting caused by my ham-fisted efforts to split the original log).
IMPLICATION: If you let it dry out after it gets wet -- rather than letting it remain damp -- wood is remarkably resiliant!
--GG
posted by Gye Greene @ 10:29 AM
4 Comments:
I love the look of weathered wood. Very textured!
I'm in the process of refinishing some chairs at the moment, and it made me think of your woodworking prowess. All the stripping and aniline dyeing and staining is a job of work. The stripping, especially, sucks big time. One of the challenges is that I'm trying to get a cappuccino-style finish from a birch wood. So, it's going to take a lot of steps, and for the dye to work well, the stripping has to be really clean. Fun times!
Gee, the least you could've done was turn the paper so that I didn't get a crook in my neck trying to read what it was about.
Slag -- Hey, good luck with that. As far as finishing, I've not yet gone beyond Boiled Linseed Oil -- so you'll be far more advanced than I!
Uncle Skip -- I think it was the betting page (horse races and such).
--GG
GG - Of course it was. That's probably why I was attracted to it and missed the whole point of your post :-)
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