10 Degree Filed Chain

[Chucksta]

I sort of duplicated this with my greenhouse, minus the dehumidifier, which I'm not sure how much help would be being outdoors and in ambient Temps. I did keep both ends of the green house open for air flow. Lumber can only dry out to the point of its surroundings....I suppose the dehumidifier would hasten the process to a point but not likely enough to prevent the boards from twisting after 2+ years of drying.

So, I've got a guy around the corner who mills, slabs, dries ... etc. He also uses a "greenhouse", to dry wood, but there's a huge difference between how he does it, and what you describe. One thing occurs, when air is heated... relative humidity drops.. significantly.. It's kinda like when you run the defroster in your car ( if you live somewhere where there's Winter). It would seem, that it doesn't matter what method is used to heat the air, the drop in relative humidity seems to be a strict function of the change of temperature. It's like a house, in the Winter, ( once again, if you live where there's Winter). It doesn't matter the method of heating ( much), whether it's electric, natural gas, wood burning fireplace, etc.. It seems that if you raise... ( let me pick numbers outta my %utt..) , air at 90 % humidity, at 20 degrees, Fahrenheit, and heat it to 80 degrees Fahrenheit, it'd be down into the 20 % relative humidity range. That's why you need a humidifier in the Winter... stops your nose from bleeding.
My neighbour uses jack for air flow.. his objective is to get the highest temp that he can in the greenhouse ( drying chamber), that he can. Swathed in dark plastic, with limited air ingress and egress, he uses only a small solar powered venting fan to draw out the humidity from what comes out of the wood. He says, that on a good sunny day, ( North Bay Ontario Canada area), it'll break 160 F in the "greenhouse", at an ambient temperature of 70 F.
You might want to slow down the air transfer on yours and see what happens. `You want to draw moist air out.. not bring it in.. Or, at least "condition", the air to the point that you want for moisture transfer.
Again.. I'm no pro at this.. at all.. But, this is what I've seen.. and it works..

 

[Mad Professor]

White oak is the most stable of oaks, which is why it's a favorite of woodworkers. Good source of info on wood characteristics I refer to all the time to see what to expect from a given wood. https://www.wood-database.com/true-hickory-and-pecan-hickory/ Don't know which type yours is. Hickory's going to shrink a lot when drying, so could be a bit difficult to keep straight. The ratio of radial to tangential drying is pretty low though meaning it should shrink somewhat evenly in both directions. My experience is any wood with a ratio above 2.0 is incredibly prone to twisting. 1.4-1.6 is a pretty stable ratio. But I like volumetric shrinkage to be below 13 percent to be predictable, when it's 17 percent or higher as a lot of oaks and hickories are, that's going to be a lot of shrinkage, some of it unpredictable. I love working with mesquite because it's so ludicrously stable. Volumetric shrinkage of 4.8 percent, almost nonexistent. Nothing in the world even close, really. Seems the most important thing to keeping twisting down on chainsaw milled flatsawn wood is getting rid of the center pith. The natural instinct is to prize the biggest center slab of a log but that's usually going to dry the worst. Best thing to do with slabs with the center pith in them is to saw them in half lengthwise and trim an inch or two off the inside edge of each one with a circular saw before stacking, to remove the pith. Even still, I find every time I trim or plane oak, even if fairly dry, it changes the stresses of how the fibers are connected and opens it up to warping some again.

Try the woodweb too

 

[JRM]

What is that, 5/4?

I cut it a heavy 1-5/8, ended up right at 1-1/2" once dried.

End checking was not bad. I painted the log ends when I cut the tree down to help mitigate that.

 

[JRM]

White oak is the most stable of oaks, which is why it's a favorite of woodworkers. Good source of info on wood characteristics I refer to all the time to see what to expect from a given wood. https://www.wood-database.com/true-hickory-and-pecan-hickory/ Don't know which type yours is. Hickory's going to shrink a lot when drying, so could be a bit difficult to keep straight. The ratio of radial to tangential drying is pretty low though meaning it should shrink somewhat evenly in both directions. My experience is any wood with a ratio above 2.0 is incredibly prone to twisting. 1.4-1.6 is a pretty stable ratio. But I like volumetric shrinkage to be below 13 percent to be predictable, when it's 17 percent or higher as a lot of oaks and hickories are, that's going to be a lot of shrinkage, some of it unpredictable. I love working with mesquite because it's so ludicrously stable. Volumetric shrinkage of 4.8 percent, almost nonexistent. Nothing in the world even close, really. Seems the most important thing to keeping twisting down on chainsaw milled flatsawn wood is getting rid of the center pith. The natural instinct is to prize the biggest center slab of a log but that's usually going to dry the worst. Best thing to do with slabs with the center pith in them is to saw them in half lengthwise and trim an inch or two off the inside edge of each one with a circular saw before stacking, to remove the pith. Even still, I find every time I trim or plane oak, even if fairly dry, it changes the stresses of how the fibers are connected and opens it up to warping some again.

Thanks, this all makes sense. I figured there had to be a reason why the table tops twisted worse than any of the others, they were the 2 widest boards (center) of the log.

We also cut some spalted maple around the same time frame at 2" boards. They weren't as wide and and most didn't twist as bad as the pin oak. Right before my son left for the service he made this sign for us as a parting gift. We set it the day before he left.

 

[GeneralKayoss]

I cut it a heavy 1-5/8, ended up right at 1-1/2" once dried.

End checking was not bad. I painted the log ends when I cut the tree down to help mitigate that.

Oh ok well you were pretty close on the dry time then, I thought it was a little thinner. Nice job on the table guys!

 

[Coralillo Lo Pro]

The one time I milled Texas red oak around 6/4 (which is its own weird thing seemingly way denser than normal red oak) I kept it in the weather or occasionally tarped and never kept on top of retightening the straps regularly as it shrunk, and it did all kinds of crazy bulging around the pith. Finally in the end got a handful of nice boards that were useable at 7', most I had to cut to 3-4' boards they were too twisted over the length of them, or cut into 18-24" sections as cutting boards, and even the nice ones were 4/4 or less by the time I was done leveling them and they stopped moving. Anything I'm thinking of using as 3/4 to 5/4 boards now, I tend to cut thick at 12/4 for the initial drying and sometime 6-12 months on I resaw them with lo pro chain down to a bit over 5/4 and restack and strap them to dry more. Took me awhile to realize the standard 9/4 slabbing thickness doesn't really work for me as a woodworker a lot of the time. It's just right for thick slab single piece entry tables and side tables and some coffee tables, but dense hardwood full size tables that thick are WAY too heavy.

There's often an assumption you're going to take a 9/4 slab down to 6/4 by the time you're done leveling it after drying, but I don't want to dry anything that badly and waste that much wood. If you try resawing a 9/4 piece in half with anything but a bandsaw, by the time it's dry and leveled you're likely to not even end up with pieces thick enough to be useable for much. So a heavy 1 5/8" was about right for what you wanted, I go for about 7/4 these days to produce something in the 5/4 to 6/4 range and try to really stay on top of retightening the straps every week for the first month or two it dries, and use straps at least every 2' of length.

 

[Mad Professor]

Something I need to learn is the stresses of boards and how best to cut.
I've got some nice long hickory logs waiting to get cut into something.
Also some white oak.

Part of milling is learning to read the log and how to open it up. I spent some time working in a lumber mill, for a while as the edger seeing all the logs cut up to get good grade. That was invaluable. I had to handle all the fletches as soon as they came off the big saw, then cut up into best boards by looking at the fletch for just a few seconds.

Straight logs with no defects are easiest to cut up. If they have knots or bends it gets more complicated. Even straight logs can have stresses if they grew as leaners; conifers will have compression wood on the leaning side, hardwoods tension wood on the uphill side.

The other thing I learned was proper stacking in preparation for drying. Have a sturdy base and good stickers ready before you start milling. We had metal banders to wrap the stacks when they got filled, that helped. Also never put the stacks in direct sunlight green.

 

[GeneralKayoss]

I kept it in the weather or occasionally tarped and never kept on top of retightening the straps regularly as it shrunk, and it did all kinds of crazy bulging around the pith. .

If not for reading that right there I would have forgotten about mine too! It's been weeks since I checked them, just got 2-4 clicks on almost everything. I've also made the determination that the cheap $12 orange HF straps are better than the $17 ones. Teeth and mechanism hold up better

 

[Coralillo Lo Pro]

Part of milling is learning to read the log and how to open it up. I spent some time working in a lumber mill, for a while as the edger seeing all the logs cut up to get good grade. That was invaluable.

That sounds like it would be an enormous help reading wood, working a job like that. I liked watching the Canadian reality show Big Timber, because while it had a lot of typically cheesy reality TV elements, I liked the wood salvage by boat part of it and all the ins and outs of running a big sawmill operation. I still haven't learned to read logs all that well yet, I usually just go with what gets me the best size slabs out of a given trunk and work with what that gives me. We don't have anything tall and straight in south Texas, just sprawling shade hardwoods that the trunk rarely goes more than 6-7' high before the crotch, if I'm really lucky I get some 8-9'. I've learned milling anything with knots/limb joints introduces all kinds of weird tensions in the wood - character too so it's a double edged sword - so I try to stick to just milling straight big trunks up to the crotch and cut come cookies out of the crotch rather than leaving any of it on my slabs. I'll still mill big limbs and higher parts of the trunk on straight trees but usually shorter 4-5' sections for smaller projects.

Btw, reading back on early 2000's posts on here about lo pro and ripping chains I came across some of your posts from then, and it struck me there seemed to be way more acceptance and knowledge about using 3/8LP back then for milling and more discussion of it, which has all but evaporated. I guess because CSM was such a small community of more inventive diehards then who didn't rely as much on existing offerings and conventional knowledge as now. People didn't think much of machining down their own 3/8LP sprockets from .404 ones, or putting on roller noses or whatever it took to run LP. Weird that 20 years later people question more now whether it's possible to mill good size logs with lo pro than they did back then.

 

[ThistleIA]

Found my 1st edition hard cover copy of Chainsaw Lumbermaking on clearance table at local Woodsmith franchise store in summer 1992 for $10.Even back then I knew that was cheap,they only had 1 copy left so I didnt hesitate in buying it.Over the years I've seen it for sale on Ebay & Amazon used book sellers for anywhere from $30 to over $100 (insanity,I'd just wait for a cheaper one to show up,they do eventually). Last I noticed the price had dropped to a more tolerable level.

Now if I could find it...its here someplace in one of the many bookcases I've built over the years,might even be laying flat on a table with stuff stacked on top of it (that happens),its been a few years since I looked at it so it'll probably turn up when I'm looking for something else,that's usually how things work for me.Could be in the shop under some stuff also.