Stacking, Cleanup, and Drying – Turning a Log into Lumber Part 3

Welcome to my basement, which is also my office and my drying room. 

Also welcome back to the series on making boards versus making slabs. In the first video of the series I showed you how to turn a log into a bunch of boards. In the second video we talked about how to turn a log into a bunch of slabs, and in this video we’re going to cover the not-so-glamorous side of lumber production: stacking, clean-up, and drying. I’m going to specifically talk about the methodology that I use to dry lumber here in my basement, which I’ve been using for about eight years. 

Right now I’m sitting on a few slabs I’ve been drying for about a year and a half, and I have some boards which are some of my own personal collection of lumber for my own projects. I use this stuff as dead weight to help hold my stack down. So the first step in stacking all my new lumber is to remove all of this dry lumber. 

Now it’s time to start stacking these boards, so we need to think about stacking strategy. If you have boards of the same thickness and the same length, you can just start stacking without planning it out. However, if you’re mixing thicknesses and lengths, you need to think about how to stack them. Here I have eight-foot slabs, nine-foot cherry boards, and 11-foot walnut boards. If the boards are different lengths, that’s pretty easy to plan out: you want to have the longer boards on the bottom, and the shorter ones towards the top so there’s always support as you go up the stack. 

If they’re different thicknesses, there’s a couple of approaches. The first is to put the thicker stuff on the bottom. If you want to be cycling out your stacks as much as possible, having the thicker stuff on the bottom allows you to leave that stuff there and take the thinner stuff off first, and put new thinner stuff on top as you cycle through. The thinner boards will dry faster than the thicker boards, allowing you to cycle. The other approach is to put the thicker stuff on top. Because the thinner boards, like the four-quarter, have a tendency to move around, there’s less structure. Putting the thicker stuff on top will hold that thinner stuff down and keep it flat. The downside to that is if you want to empty out the thinner stock on the bottom, you need to remove all the thick stuff on the top which may not be dry. If you’re not worried about cycling out stock, that might be a better way to go. 

Today I’m mixing all kinds of things: I have different lengths, I have different thicknesses, I have edged and non-edged boards. That means my strategy is going to be a little bit unique. I will put my long boards, the walnut, down first. The longest stuff needs to contact the base across its entire length. I’ll stack the cherry boards along with that, so all my four-quarter is going to go on first. 

After the first layer, I need to put my stickers down and keep stacking. 

Before stacking these, I am using a broom to knock off the snow and any sawdust that is still on the surface. Sawdust holds moisture, and holding moisture is a good way for you to get some mold on your boards. It also means that the boards going in the house are cleaner, so less vacuuming for me to do later.

Before stacking these odd shaped boards, I’ll cut away undesirable areas. For stacking, the stickers need to end up on boards that are a consistent thickness so the stacks don’t get thrown off.

To make sure that there is a consistent weight across these layers on the stickers, I have to use some spacers. 

Now it’s time to bring these guys in. Again there’s a couple of stacking strategies that come to mind for this. First off, I can keep stacking these in layers like we’ve been making so far, or we could bring them in exactly like this and leave them as a unit and stack them on top of the existing stack that’s there. Looking at the size of these things, I could actually get them both on top of the stack if I spin the walnut slab around and stack it next to the cherry one. 

With stacking slabs like this is that they’re nowhere near as space efficient to stack in one spot. If these were edged, you could probably get three slabs per layer, but with them in slab form you’re probably only going to get two per layer. 

That is going to do it for getting all the stuff stacked. At this point I can start bringing in all of my dry stuff to act as dead weight, and this stuff can sit in here and dry for a little while. In a couple months, we’ll come back and talk more about the specifics of the drying schedule and why I have things the way they are. But until then, let’s talk a bit about waste and cleaning up and disposing of all of that. 

Next we can take a look at the waste or the offcuts. This is four logs, and I did slabs for two  of the logs and boards for two of the logs. You would have more waste if you are doing all boards. You need to find some way to deal with all this waste. There’s a few strategies that you can employ. When I was cutting stuff up with Jim at his farm, we would only handle this material once. This stuff would go from the sawmill into a burn pile, and he would light it on fire once a year and get rid of it all at once. That’s a great strategy. Another method is to give it away for firewood. That’s a very good way to go because it’s very minimal input on your part if the person coming to get it handles picking it up and putting it in their truck and getting it out of your way. You can cut it up for firewood and use it for yourself, or if there is a market for it, you can try to sell it for firewood. 

In my case, my neighbor has a firewood rack and we share that, so I’ll just fill it up with offcuts I have from cutting on the sawmill. Once those racks are full, this stuff goes on Craigslist so someone else can deal with it. 

You’re also going to be left with all the little edging strips as well, if you are edging your boards. Again, these can go for firewood, but edging logs produces a ton of waste. I used to use these in cutting boards for strips because they don’t have to dry really straight or flat because they’re going to get glued into a big block of cutting boards. You can also dry them and use them for sticker stock. I have no interest in doing that with these anymore, so as I’m processing this into firewood. 

Next up is the sawdust and bark and chips and the stuff that falls around the sawmill. It’s pretty easy to just scoop it up and dump it in the wheelbarrow. Once this is full, I’ll dump the wheelbarrow along the back of my property to decompose. All in all, the cleanup produced four wheelbarrow loads of debris, roughly two loads of sawdust and two loads of bark and chips.

It’s a few months later, and now everything is dried. I stacked everything in here at the beginning of December and it is now the end of May. The four-quarter stock was fully dried back in mid-February. 

Here’s a little bit about my stacking process here in the basement and how it differs from conventional stacking methods. First off, I have the stack almost all the way up against the wall, which prevents natural air flow from going through the stack. I also have half inch thick stickers, which is conventionally pretty thin for stickering lumber. That also affects the airflow in the stack, and keeps it at a minimum. I’ve also stacked another stack of logs over here which boxes things in and prevents natural air flow through the stack even more. 

All of that restriction puts me in control of the amount of air flow that goes through the stack using a fan. By using a fan, I can control the drying rate of this stuff, because the biggest problem with drying in the basement is that it gets so dry here in the winter that this will dry too fast if allowed to dry in a conventional manner, where you have a maximal amount of air flow going through it. When I stacked the lumber in here, the relative humidity in the basement was 10%, which is incredibly dry. The humidity stays at 10% from about November through March, so I have a decent amount of time to get the lumber down to a really dry level. With a relative humidity of 10%, it’s pretty easy to get your lumber down to six percent or lower. 

Now what ends up happening, though, is that springtime comes and summer starts hitting, and then the relative humidity starts popping back up again, so now we’re into the 40’s for the relative humidity here in the house. These boards were sitting around six percent a few months ago, and now they’ve come up to around eight and a half percent. 

That’s one of the fundamentals of wood: It’s going to absorb or release moisture depending on the environment, until it reaches an equilibrium point where the moisture doesn’t travel in or out of the wood anymore. But if that environment changes at all, like if the humidity level in the air rises, that’s going to cause moisture to go into the wood. If the humidity level drops again, the moisture is going to come out of the wood, into the air, until it’s at equilibrium, and there’s no more moisture exchange. 

One of the tools you’re going to need if you’re going to be drying your own lumber is a good moisture meter. Years ago, when I started drying my own lumber, I invested in a good moisture meter so that I could make sure that the lumber was right where the moisture needed to be. I bought one of these pinless meters from Wagner which can be placed directly onto the wood and it will give you a reading. This will give you a reading that is the average of the moisture content from the thickness of the board down to three-quarters of an inch into the board. The moisture meter allows me to track the drying rate of the lumber to make sure it’s not drying too quickly, and it also allows me to check and see when it’s actually fully dried and ready to go. 

I don’t track the drying progress nearly as much as I used to because I’ve done this so many times it’s just become a repetitive process. For a four-quarter stock that’s green, coming right off the saw, I try to target a 10-week drying period. For the first 14 days, I will run the fan continuously, which will drive out all of the free moisture. After about 14 days, the lumber is going to be down in the upper 20’s. At that point, I’ll run the fans about 2-3 times a week for a few weeks, and then I will go to just once a week. 

For now I’m keeping all of the stuff that I cut in the last two videos, so I’m not too worried about unstacking those or moving them. But I do have a project in mind that’s going to use some of the cherry crotches. So I’m going to grab a couple of those, and I’ll see you in the shop. For most people this is where a project starts: with a dried, rough piece of lumber. Even if you haven’t cut or dried your lumber before, hopefully this series has given you some appreciation and understanding of the process of turning a log into something that you can actually work with. There is a significant amount of effort and sometimes skill involved in that process.

Thank you, as always, for watching. I greatly appreciate it. If you have any questions or comments about cutting your own lumber, drying, stacking, what have you, please feel free to leave me a comment. As always, I’ll be happy to answer any questions you might have. Until next time, happy woodworking!