Relative Humidity
- Thread starter aphelps1
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I have not read much, just gazed through it.
A fantastic book on a variety of woods.
Something that also effects stress in the wood is where it is grown.Trees that are straight and on flat land yield a better quality of wood.
Pine tress here can grow so fast,the wood can only be used for wood pulp.
I have seen rings where the growth rings are more than 1/2 inch apart.
We also have some very slow growing trees where the growth rings are very close together,some more than 80 gpi. Most of these woods are very consistent in density. So with a chisel it does not feel any different when going with the grain or across it.
Down in the S H, tree wood from the southern side is denser than that of the north facing wood, but not on all variety of trees.Mostly Native trees
that take about 200-350 years to mature. The very slow growing trees, 600-900 years to maturity, have a very even density.
Due to the value of the wood, alot more care is taken in the milling process. Some mills now level the log to get the straightest possible lumber, and the payback is premium wood at a more than a premium price.
Back to the original question, I try and keep my shop at 55-65% .
The humidity here varies from 50% to as high as 99%. On the very high humidity days, water does not dry off the floor.
Neil
I'm certainly no professor or expert, just study a lot & get as much hands on as I can. I tend to get obsessive about subjects that interest me & absorb as much as I can, and do my best to take a logical approach to things. With shaft wood, this has led me to literally logging & milling & drying wood so to get first hand experience to go with the information I have read & been taught by others. What I have found is that cues, specifically shafts, are a science all to itself. Some of the general wood knowledge applies & can be borrowed from general wood working, but for the most part it is its own science totally separate from the general wood working realm.
As far as I know, nobody has studied & experimented to great extent on how things should happen with shaft wood in order to maximize quality & yield. If so, it's not a shared knowledge. So it's what I have been doing for the past several years, for my own satisfaction & hopefully for an advancement of the craft. I don't mind sharing info because I, myself, like to learn. If I miss something or experience some different than somebody else, then let's figure out what & why. I don't reveal everything I learn, and won't. But I enjoy sharing a lot of it & hopefully open folks' eyes to a lot of the misconceptions & mysticism surround cue wood. I have consulted with foresters, loggers, mills, kiln manufacturers, etc. & kind of have a peg on the situation.
The loggers, who are actually on the ground cutting trees, pretty unanimously agree that logs best suitable for shafts are few & scattered. Even expensive veneer logs aren't necessarily good for shafts, so they recommended not hunting for logs at auction. Loggers & foresters alike all tell me that to get the trees best suited for shafts would require very specific select logging practices, which is basically too expensive to justify typical logging equipment. Why use $300,000 worth of machines to rip up an entire 50 acre forest tract to cut half a dozen trees? It's losing money & tearing up the local ecosystem for very little purpose. It's simply unjustifiable. One outfit referred me to some smaller, non-intrusive equipment that is very easy on the terrain & doesn't require cutting a road. I'm actually investing in it. They all pretty much tell me the only way to get this particular grade of tree is to either go out with a log crew from site to site & have them set those logs aside, which is a liability they aren't willing to risk, or else begin logging myself & that means buying select trees from property owners & retrieving the logs myself. Basically, that's what I have been doing.
Point of that bit of info is that loggers & foresters know exactly what we need for cue shafts, but it's not worth it for them to sort & market. So basically, unless a shaft supplier is logging their own wood, they have little to no control or knowledge over what they process. They do their best with the situation, which is picking logs from auction or logger yards, but have absolutely no idea the conditions the tree actually grew in. Of course they all tout their wood as something special & it was processed like this or like that, came from here or came from there. But that's about all they know & it's only the second half of the story. Try watching a movie from half way to the end, never seeing the first half, and try writing an essay on it. Don't get me wrong, I have nothing against ANY shaft supplier nor think they are dishonest. They do their best & provide what they feel is a quality product to an industry that is picky & finicky. My hat's off to them. And unless you are logging your own trees, you have no choice but to take what's available. So nobody's really any better off than another. I just wanted to take a logical approach, with an inside point of view, to see exactly what's going on. What I find is a total misconception of what good shaft wood is & where it comes from, and especially how to process it. Cue makers are living in the dark and just accepting the status-quo.
The very best shaft wood is in the mix. Some of what you get is awesome, while most is not. This is why some shafts in a batch are just friggin awesome & you don't know why, and can't seem to get it consistently. They came from that one log of 20 that was growing in the "sweet spot", which the rest are just typical lumber or veneer grade maples. Would be nice if there was a "shaft grade" for logs, but unfortunately our industry is far too tiny & insignificant to justify it. Nobody would want to pay the price it would cost, anyway. So we keep on keeping on with what we can get. Not a very pleasant picture but it's exactly true. Kinda like eating a hot dog when you know you could have a steak if only that farmer would butcher the cow.
Same thing here in NF and GA with the pines. They grow very quickly on large farming tracks, are cut then replanted to do It again, and are often used in the paper mill industry. I would not even use them to frame a building if It were free, because It's not as strong, It's porous, and here, the bugs would chew through It in a year. The old growth pine they used to frame with back pre 1960's was very dense though, and much more resistant to insects. Although eventually the bugs will win out if given the opportunity, and eventually eat out everything around the sappy areas. The real sappy boards, if they never twisted, could hold out for 50-60 years or more even with no pest control. If a fire was start, It goes up like a match head though.
Old timers tell me pine used to be a relatively hard wood back when. They say it is incomparable to the wood cut today. Heard the same about western douglas fir, too. I imagine the same can be related to the hardwoods.
From what I've seen It was. Other then the tell tale signs, It almost seems like a totally different wood. The hardness level/ density is totally different in comparison. To me the color is different as well.
I have one piece of lake-salvaged Sycamore.
I'd get a ton more if they were affordable.
How much you want? Rivers & streams where I grew up are full of sycamore that would be relatively easy for the picking. It won't rot because it's submerged, so it eventually gets swallowed up by the mud. I can cut you some this fall if you want.
If you baby your child, it never knows up of the stress of growing up. Different races, religions, personalities, that are very differenet than those that they have been raised with. Let your child grow & experience the freedom that is needed to mature. My 3 children have grown up in this enviornment. 1 is a nuclear engineer, 1 is a professor, teaching at a collage & 1 the smartest ) has a degree in sociology ....& sells guitars in a guitar shop in Denver. This only shows that no matter how you raise your kids or how you baby your wood....shit happens. What will be ...will be...JER
equalization is also determined by ambient conditions and will happen naturally depending on how long the material can sit before being machined. Case hardening occurs when drying too fast. If it does occur equalizasion will ease those stresses. "Case Hardening" is exactly what it implies it's like a shell. There are other factors that can affect the case hardening issue, one is the number of times the material is machined. If there is case hardening present, once the material is machined and that outer .0625" or .125" is removed then theoretically you've removed the shell. Another factor is the original size of the material when it is dried. If you notice most of the studies are with 4/4 material. In this case if you are trying to produce a 1 inch dowel from 4/4 rough kiln dried material you have no room for error, but if you produce 1 inch dowels from say 12/4 or 16/4 rough kiln dried material then.......you've got room to play. So much of the finished piece is determined by how and where it was originally processed. That's actually one of the reasons I started this mill, it gives me control.
From someone who knows something about woods .
From someone who knows something about woods .
Exactly the reason I mill my own instead of buying. Case hardening can be prevented, or at minimum greatly reduced, if you have the time & are careful not to let too much moisture escape too rapidly. Stresses can also be eliminated or greatly avoided with the dimensions the wood is cut to from the log. But as far as I know, it's not being done by anybody but one, and he doesn't supply all that much.
http://na.fs.fed.us/pubs/silvics_manual/volume_2/acer/saccharum.htm
A good read & a general idea of how important it is to know specific growing conditions of the log, and whether it was understory or canopy tree. Buying shafts or even lumber, you have no idea. Even buying logs at auction and you have no idea. Logging your own, and you can be pretty certain. But that's unrealistic, so most of us must trust our suppliers & deal with the cull as it happens.
In the article it loosely describes old growth stands of maple & what the trees look like. It's pretty much dead nuts accurate. I know of a few of these stands. One is in UP MI on a national park. One is on some property of mine in Ohio, and another is on a state forest in Ohio, plus a few scattered in farming areas of Wisconsin. I'm sure there are thousands of these stands scattered throughout the eastern half of the country but most are inaccessible or protected. I have cut a couple from a stand in Wisconsin & the wood was thoroughly caramel brown right off the mill, and retained the color through drying. It was some amazing shaft wood. Tree was about 300yrs old. I'm going to cut a couple this coming November in Ohio, if I can get the mill to them. It's actually easier to haul the mill to the log in this situation as it's a ridge top & steep slope atop the Appalachians. No way I can intelligently & safely get 3'x9' old growth logs down to the valley below without killing myself. I'll post pics of the trees, the general stand of trees, and pics throughout the process. I love working with old growth wood. It's almost like an entirely different species.
I have disagree with you on these statements. You can't minimize the effects of climate and geographical regions. How long the days are and how cold and long the winters are play a HUGE role in the growth of a tree.
Try cutting some birch from near the tree line in the arctic regions. If you compare the lumber to the same speices of tree in more southern regions of Canada you would think they were two different types of wood. The trees grow so slowly that you cant even distinguish the growth rings and the wood is much harder. Just my opinion thou. I have know doubts of your knoledge and am not trying direspect you in any way.
You aren't incorrect. My statement wasn't to disqualify regional climate, but to count it out as sole factor. It's one of several factors & has nothing to do with the soil nutrition, soil type, competition, sunlight, water, etc. All play a role. Your example of arctic birch is also correct. I lived in Anchorage for several years. Birch trees are a popular yard tree. They grow fast, have beautiful white bark, and add lots of green in the summer months. The growth lines are several mm apart. The same exact species, 200 miles inland from the coast, same latitude, the trees grow tremendously slower & grain lines look like sheets of paper rolled into a tree. The region is the same, same daylight, same seasons, but area specific conditions in that region control actual growth rate.
It's not unlike maple. Northern MI has longer winters and shorter growing season than TN, but an undergrowth maple in a dense oak & ash forest of TN, especially high in the mountains and on a north slope, will grow significantly slower than trees in MI that have no competition for sunlight & nutrition, on a flat wooded plain. Logically speaking, trees in MI should grow slower because of regional climate. But specific details cannot be overlooked & ignored.
So no, you are not incorrect. And I don't take it as an argument. You're very much right. The difference is the level of generality that we are looking at. I was looking at more specific localized conditions, where I believe you are looking at the broader spectrum of regional conditions.
qbilder, taking this to it's next logical step - serious here not being a smart arse;
Do you (or have you considered), or would you recommend to other cue makers, taking a square and turning it down to shaft size over a very brief period of time? Just the opposite of babying it! Test the wood. Put it through it's paces. If it remains stable doing this, you can trust that it probably will never warp. If it does warp, you find out early and pitch it. If this is practical, it would save time for the cue maker and get ever more customer satisfaction.
Fatz
Lol....I must be getting old before my time. Thanks for pointing it out. I make fun of my dad for repeating the same story over and over again. F..k now it's me...
