Drying Apple wood?

[hbmcc]

Everything I read about apple is that it's a bear to dry! Has anyone dried their own? Advice?

The sawman is coming tomorrow to remove my apple tree. He will buck up firewood and I wanted to grab some for a few little projects. Handles for my two Disston's being one project. 

Will be setting aside some wood from the apple and a cherry for smoking too.

Thanks for the help!

[ianab]

Main issues are that fruit woods like that shrink a lot as they dry, and the "logs" are seldom either large or straight. So now you have different shrinkage in different parts of the board, and the thing wants to turn into a pretzel. It's easy enough to dry, but getting long straight pieces at the end is a challenge. 

BUT, don't let this put you off. 

Cut a bit oversize, so you can joint / plane out some of the distortion later, and coat the ends of the boards in wax or sealer to reduce end checking. Then if you can put a HEAP of weight on top as it's drying, think 4" layer of concrete on top of the stack for example, that will help too. 

If you only need smaller pieces for tool handles etc, then go for it.

[jasfrank]

I have a piece that I have been shop drying for a couple years now. It started at about 6X10X20 and still looks fairly good and somewhat lighter, but it has twisted a bit. I was hoping to get enough out of it for 2 or 3 saw handles. I was planning to rip it into smaller slabs, maybe 5/4 or 6/4 soon and let it continue drying another year. I waited to pare it down until I could see where any major cracks were going to happen.

[jteneyck]

Apple is tough to saw into lumber and what I cut twisted every which way as it dried.  After it was dry it was hard as a rock working it.  But for small projects, sure, go ahead.  I would do as Ian suggested and cut it a little thicker than normal, so if you want 4/4 dry I'd cut it at least 5/4.  

John

[Woodshop]

some apple sure can be pretty . I can tell you it is great to turn about like maple, be sure to seal the end grain same day

[Hank Knight]

Don't know if this will be of any help, but I'll share it anyway. Drying wood too fast is the root of many problems. I learned a trick from Ron Brese for gently drying handle blanks to the desired moisture content. It's called a 'finishing kiln" and it's a piece of cake to build. I bought some 8/4 Gibon ebony for saw handles. It arrived at 18% M/C. I needed it to be around 7%, So I built Ron's finishing kiln from some 1/4" plywood, a light socket and a 60 watt incandescent light bulb. The kiln is a tall stack with a rack in the middle and the light bulb at the bottom. The light bulb generates a little heat that causes the air to rise gently up the stack past the handle blanks suspended in the air stream on the rack. I brought my ebony blanks from 18% MC to 7% in about 2 1/2 months with no warping, checking or another horrors. Here's a couple of photos:

IMG_0136 by Hank Knight, on Flickr

IMG_0138 by Hank Knight, on Flickr

Well, actually the thin offcuts cupped a little as you can see in the bottom photo, but the handle blanks were fine.

[MichaelMouse]

Everything I read about apple is that it's a bear to dry! Has anyone dried their own? Advice?

The sawman is coming tomorrow to remove my apple tree. He will buck up firewood and I wanted to grab some for a few little projects. Handles for my two Disston's being one project. 

Will be setting aside some wood from the apple and a cherry for smoking too.

Thanks for the help!

The enemy is us.  And Ma Nature.  We trim and prune for easy low picking, stressing the wood in places it would never be if free grown.  Twists, splits and acts weird because of it.  Ma Nature also puts most energy into fruit, not wood, which means annual rings are pretty narrow.  

I'd get the most promising pieces reduced in dimension as a first step.  Be generous, and expect some losses.  Spoons carved from fresh wood seem to age well as long as there are no embedded knots.  The wood from the volunteer apple trees along the road where kids threw cores into the ditch on their way to and from school is better, in my experience, with less unanticipated twist and split.  

Good luck.

[hbmcc]

Thank you everyone for your helpful comments! I should learn today whether the wood in this thing is solid. It's a front yard landscape tree and I am a lazy gardener. The form had few attacks by H. sapiens, so I do hope for something useful. Its best growth was the 25 years I watched it. Will see....

I will try Hanks dryer, which is similar to many small plans I have seen. If I can keep the treasure from Madame Disposal's clutches I hope to have a few on S$S for others who, like me, watched and waited.

[ianab]

The little "drying box" that Hank showed will work fine to get small pieces from "air dry" to "kiln" dry. If you air dry first, it will probably drop to 12-15% depending on the season and your climate. But you usually want your wood more like 8% to be stable inside a normal Nth American home (with climate control etc). Simple way to do this is put it in a warm dry place, and wait 

I wouldn't put  green wood in a box like that, as it doesn't have the control systems a real kiln has, and there is a risk of drying too fast, which can cause surface checking, case hardening, internal collapse etc. But once your wood is "air dry", under about 20%, it's hard to mess up, and a warm box like that will be OK.

[MichaelMouse]

The little "drying box" that Hank showed will work fine to get small pieces from "air dry" to "kiln" dry. If you air dry first, it will probably drop to 12-15% depending on the season and your climate. But you usually want your wood more like 8% to be stable inside a normal Nth American home (with climate control etc). Simple way to do this is put it in a warm dry place, and wait 

I wouldn't put  green wood in a box like that, as it doesn't have the control systems a real kiln has, and there is a risk of drying too fast, which can cause surface checking, case hardening, internal collapse etc. But once your wood is "air dry", under about 20%, it's hard to mess up, and a warm box like that will be OK.

S.O.P. for local hardwood operations was yard dry first, kiln second.  Newer kilns have the proper humidity control to bring the wood down slowly.  LOTS of sticky liquid evacuated early on.

With the heat on, my spring-cut stash is generally ~4% by January.