Thread: sealing wet silky oak

Hi Mick - welcome to the forum. I see you've had a lot of looks at your post, but no replies yet, so her's my 2c. Just go ahead and get the ends painted as soon as the paint will stick, which is immediately, if you're using a proprietary sealer or water-based paint. This not only helps prevent the ends drying too quickly, it discorouges borers fom laying their eggs in the open pores of teh sapwood. Borers love SO sapwood!

At the risk of telling you what you already know, here's some basic wood technology: The whole idea of 'sealing' the ends is to slow down water egress from the ends, and buy time while it moves (much more slowly) out through the sides. Free water moves easily along the vessels and so the ends dry rapidly & shrink as the 'bound' water (the water in the cell walls) evaporates. The outer wood cells contain more water, both free and bound, than the innner wood cells. As they dry to the same moisture content, they shrink much more than the inner cells, especially, but not exclusively, the sapwood cells. This puts stress on the wood that results in end cracks, which can start within hours in some woods like She-oak.

Splitting the green log into half sections or smaller portions is to prevent uncontrolled splitting due to the same underlying cause. Even if you dry the wood at an even rate and very slowly, most woods will split longitudinally, in one or many places because of differential shrinkage of inner & ouiter cells. Some woods will dry 'in the round' without splitting, either because they don't have such a high water differential between the inner & outer cells, or very low overall shrinkage, or the wood is sufficiently elastic & is able to absorb the stresses (or a combination of all 3). Woods that can be dried without splitting can be hard (Mulga) or soft (Jacarandah). There is no way to predict which are safe & which are not, it's a matter of experience. I don't know of any list of those that are safe to dry in the round, you just have to ask people who have tried them. I've seen branches of SO dried successfully without serious splits, but I wouldn't take the risk with larger sections of trunk.

Cheers,

Ian,

very much appreciated for the detailed response In my opinion you can never be too detailed and I very much appreciated the lesson. After other research I have bought commercial end-grain sealer. When I had not got a response I snuck a PM to rustynail who basically said the same as you, so I did seal the ends and split the bigger rounds. Such a great forum for learning.
cheers
Mick