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  1. #1
    Join Date
    Nov 2021
    Location
    Cambridge, Cambridgeshire
    Posts
    3

    Default Novice needing advice on drying and planking cherry wood

    I have just felled a large apple tree and have divided the trunk into two pieces, each approximately one foot wide and four feet long. The wood looks beautifully free of splits and holes and I wish to have it dried and cut into planks. I have found a local sawmill near Cambridge UK where the owner tells me that the way he would proceed is to saw it into planks and then dry it. But others, including many contributors to forums, say ' seal the ends and dry it for years before cutting into planks'.
    Who is right? Should I find a sawmill with a different procedure? I have no experience of seasoning cherry or any other type of wood.

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  3. #2
    Join Date
    May 2013
    Location
    Rockhampton QLD
    Age
    68
    Posts
    2,335

    Default

    Welcome to the forum.

  4. #3
    Join Date
    Apr 2006
    Location
    Hobart
    Posts
    5,105

    Default

    The vast majority of commercial timber goes straight from forest or plantation to sawmill to kiln drier.

    I use a little fruitwood - cherry, apple, pear, peach, etc - salvaged from backyards. My view is that your miller is largely right and suggest that you consider:
    • Mill to oversize planks - say 30 or 50 mm thick - that''s what I do,
    • Then paint the ends with water based paints to slow the drying process,
    • Then sticker planks being very careful to align stickers vertically; I use 12 or 16 mm MDF strips about 20 mm wide,
    • Then dry out of direct sunlight for 12 months for each 25 mm thickness.

    Expect about 15% wastage. It is not a perfect process and some bits of timber are just hornery.

  5. #4
    Join Date
    Jul 2005
    Location
    Oberon, NSW
    Age
    63
    Posts
    13,354

    Default

    One reason many woodworkers, especially turners, like to keep the timber in large pieces is because they don't know what sizes they want out of it yet and don't imagine needing that particular timber in the next few years. Stockpiles are lovely things but they do tend to eat up space for long periods.

    If you, as a woodworker, mostly work with timbers of a fairly standard set of sizes then it makes sense to mill it down to approximately those sizes (over-size, as Graeme said) as this'll allow them to dry fairly quickly.

    A 1" board should be reasonably dry within a year. A 6" split log may take 7 or 8 years to reach the same EMC.
    I may be weird, but I'm saving up to become eccentric.

    - Andy Mc

  6. #5
    Join Date
    Nov 2021
    Location
    Cambridge, Cambridgeshire
    Posts
    3

    Default

    Thank you for this very helpful reply. If I can transport the two halves of the trunk, which seem to be around 100kg each, I will get them to the sawmill and have them made into
    oversize planks.

  7. #6
    Join Date
    Nov 2021
    Location
    Cambridge, Cambridgeshire
    Posts
    3

    Default

    Dear Skew ChiDamn!!,
    Thanks for your good advice. Size is the biggest problem for me. The 'Old' in my username means 76 this month. The young treesurgeons who came to fell the tree could pick up the top and bottom halves of the trunk by one end and roll each half-trunk end-over-end. I realized just how old I have recently become when I had to lug out my enginecrane to lift each of the two pieces off my lawn and get them stored on pallets in the patio. Now I have to get them to the front of the house, up a narrow side-passage. I may be able to use a big skate which I constructed for getting a heavy lathe into my van. If I can't get them to the sawmill (about 10 miles away) for a reasonable cost I will probably try to sell them or give them away to turners who have the muscle and transport to deal with them and fewer years on the mileometer than me. And I can go back to making benches and smaller items out of spruce studding and baltic ply...

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