Seasoning of logs

[brainstrust]

Tell me please turners!!!!
A fresh log say 2 or 3 foot long.
To what degree do you cut them down and seal to season?
How close to ready to use on the lathe do you get them?

[orraloon]

In general wood dries at about 25mm per year so a really thick log can take many years to dry. Bowl turners rough turn bowls to about 25mm thick from really wet logs. Then let the rough turned bowl dry for about 6 months in a shaded cool place with good ventilation. Then back to the lathe to complete the turning. There are some losses along the way as some warp and or crack during drying and some can grow moldy. Some woods are better driers than others. Anyhow you can have bowls in less than a year rather than growing old waiting for big logs to dry. It is also better to avoid using the pith or heart of the log as thats usually where cracks start from. Do some google searching on wet rough turning and also how to prepare a log for turning.
Regards
John

[hughie]

Thats good advice and I will under line about the pith, remove as soon as you can. When you store your timber, I tend to store it the out of the sun and wind in a cool spot. If roughing out for later I coat the outside with BLO and then store in a cardboard box face down.

[Skew ChiDAMN!!]

If you have a chainsaw or a suitable bandsaw and blade and feel comfortable doing so, I'd split the log down the middle.

If the log is of a reasonable diameter, it's better to make two parallel cuts, each an 1" or two offset from the centre line, so you end up with two 'nearly' half logs and a board 2"-4" thick containing the pith. You can then cut the pith out of that board and sticker the results.

I like to leave my half-logs intact (I have the storage room for 'em) and only dock off what I want as I need it. Cutting down to size and/or pre-roughing will certainly quicken the time between log and lathe, but it pretty much predetermines what you're going to make from that blank. Most of my work nowadays uses... 'non-standard' shaped blanks so that method is pretty much useless for me.

I do seal the ends very thoroughly, both ends of the logs initially and the fresh-cut face when I dock a piece off. It doesn't hurt to seal all of the exposed grain, including the long-grain from splitting the log, but it's the ends that are most important.

As Bob said, storing it somewhere cool and dry is best... although well ventilated is also a must. You don't want to dry the timber too fast, nor do you want to create a haven for mould or fungi. ;)

[NeilS]

If you have a chainsaw or a suitable bandsaw and blade and feel comfortable doing so, I'd split the log down the middle.



That's what I do, as soon as possible.

I used to then paint to slow down the cracking, but now I just wrap in garbage bags. Most woods can cope with being wrapped up wet for a week.

I have never cut out the pith. If required, I remove that at the rough turning stage, which I do as soon as possible after bagging.

That method works OK for the woods I mostly turn. Your woods may be different.

I have a different method for drying to the one used by Hughie. I box up my rough turned bowls with wet shavings around the outside and, where I can, I leave the insides of the bowls free of shavings. With the woods I mostly turn I like the drying to start from the inside and progress from there to the outsides. My thinking is that this avoids the outer layer of wood drying first, shrinking first, and then trying to stretch around the yet to dry inner most layer of wood. My observation is that I get less splitting at the rim if I do it that way. I expect that Hughie's method of stacking his rouged out bowls with rims-down slows the drying in that rim area with similar improved result. I might try your method Hughie with my next batch of rough turned bowls.

Almost all of my decisions about a finished piece are made at the rough turning stage. Fortunately, I rarely disagree with myself when I come back to re-turn a piece. However, remembering what my intentions were when I come back to a pre-turned blank that has been waiting ten or twenty years to be finish can a bit of a challenge at times...:U

I expect one of these days when I can't remember my own name I'll be wondering who was the silly bugger who only half turned all those bowls, etc., and left them in my workshop...:?

BTW, some turners in the US and Europe make the bulk of their living from selling pre-turned rough blanks. Now, that's an idea!