sundance said:
I have a question.
I have much wood from many places and have noticed the odd bug here and there in the workshop.
Is there any reliable way to rif myself of these without messing up the rest of the house in the process?
Thanks in advance for any help.
Don.
If all you are seeing is an "odd bug here and there" then I wouldn't be too concerned. If, however, you are seeing a bunch of them or are hearing them or seeing new holes, or powder being deposited from their actions, then you should consider doing something.
The cheap and fairly easy route for a good pile of wood that you don't want to handle on a piece-by-piece basis is to just set off a bug bomb like you would in the house. These are more or less safe when used according to their directions and, being that, aren't terribly effective. They'll help a little and that might be all that you need.
A better alternative is to hire the services of an insect and bug exterminator. Tell them your situation and they'll do what they can to help you out. Most likely, they'll spray, etc. the area and the wood. There's some risk of working that wood in the future but then you might be VERY surprised just how much of the wood we come into contact with everyday, and especially as woodworkers/woodturners, has been fumigated, instecticided, and treated to the hilt. The vast majority carries no consumer-level information about that either.
If you want to treat this wood on a piece by piece basis, then I can recommend two approaches to that as well.
One being to dry it. Dry wood helps (but certainly doesn't always stop already infected or aquiring infection later) to deter many bugs. Of course, there are those bugs that just love dry wood too. For wood that you suspect to be bug ridden, you can, using various methods such as a solar kiln, kitchen oven, microwave or whatever else you want, raise that core temperature of the piece of wood to around 135F for about 30 minutes. This is, or at least most likely will become one of the major ways of EU certifying wood in the near future since the use of methyl bromide is going away.
Of course, the use of methyl bromide is more than what you want to get into (believe me!), it's been the standard for many years here in the USA, especially for exporting wood products, and most industrialized countries in the world. It's going away here in the USA so we're looking for alternatives and the heating mentioned above is one of several. We've been using methyl bromide on our logs that we don't want to dry (so, no kilns at my stage for these particular products) but are having to look at alternatives ... heat being not one of them, unfortunately. I have to keep the bugs away from this wood product or otherwise I won't be able to sell it.
The problem with the heating is one of getting things too hot. For normal drying operations of hardwoods (not trying to kill bugs as mentioned above), I don't let my solar kilns get above 125F, at most. Sure, it'll dry the wood out faster as you increase the temperature beyond this and kill the bugs but it'll also likely introduce worse problems than some bugs ... at least to your wood stash. You'll get all kinds of drying defects that won't show up till you start working that wood. I could dry out a lot of wood in just a week if I just let my solar kilns "go at it" in the summertime. But the resulting wood would be useless. So, if you use the heat/drying methods, just realize that you may be trading one problem with another.
