Hey folks, I'm an intermediate turner/arborist in Tn. I'm wondering if anyone has a tried/true method of preparing green blanks, sealing (I'm using anchor seal) and storing until dry. I'm very familiar with turning and storing green wood. So far there are many cracks in my process. I do have the ability to store logs but looking to try different methods. So far turning dry blanks (with cracks) for practice has been incredibly different. Thanks and stay cool!
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green blank prep. until dry
- Thread starter JJ Bergman
- Start date
Pretty much impossible to store green blanks/slabs without them cracking. I prefer whole logs, in the shade some where, white tarps under and on top, and then cut off as needed. Wood over 8/4 or 2 inches thick never reaches "equilibrium" so the middle is moister than the outside, this causes stress, and wood relieves stress by cracking. Thicker slabs are much more prone to this than thinner ones. 2 inch thick, you might get away with it, 3 inch or thicker, and you don't get away with it....
robo hippy
robo hippy
Thanks, makes sense. I’ve learned tons from your videos. Thanks for those too.
john lucas
AAW Forum Expert
You have to keep them in an area with very little air movement and out if direct sunlight. I thought I had it down to a science in my old shop. Moved and started having cracks. The blanks are stored in an attached shed with my dust collector. It's an insulated steel attached shed. I started having cracks. It was the air movement from the dusty outside often can't see these crack. collector. I put shower curtains up across the shelves. Rooms to be working now. Another trick I use is to put plastic bags over the ends of the logs as soon as they are cut. I find wood starts to crack as soon as it's cut if sun and wind hits it. I keep the bags on until i have time to process tge wood. Since I started doing this my losses were greatly reduced.
Hello JJ.
I do this all the time, for close to 20 years now, many, many hundreds. I have a good success rate. However, "banks" is a encompassing word and means different things to different people. I think my largest was 10"x10"x14" maple, end grain orientation, no pith. Small is trivial.
Some big variables are the type of wood, the size of the blank, what kind of blank (can the pith be removed?), how and where it is cut from the tree, the grain orientation, what time of the year it was cut, how sealed (of course), and the storage/drying environment. (My shop and wood drying/storage areas are climate controlled.)
And of course proper sealing implies not only the sealer used but where to seal (sometimes I have to seal more than the end grain).
I find off-the-shelf Anchorseal almost worthless for drying green blanks. I've written elsewhere of how I thicken Anchorseal to make it far more useful.
The specific tree and how it grew is a huge variable. For example, our native black cherry is notorious for starting to check almost immediately after cutting. But I had one large cherry that simply refused to check and crack - even for a log section I left out in the sun for years as a test. Sadly, I'm down to my last piece of that tree - still round, contains the pith, not cracked after a dozen years. Magic...
On a side note, realize some blanks, depending again on certain factors, may take years or even a decade to dry.
I made a video on preparing and drying blanks for a pandemic club Zoom meeting. It needs some revising (and shortening) but might be useful if you haven't seen it. It's mostly about cutting blanks on the shop bandsaw but I included some things about sealing and drying.
Also, other steps can be taken, such as boiling wood - almost needed to stop the cracking for certain tropical species, but it has a few downsides. The late wood exporter Jim King from Iquitos, Peru, told me some big blanks I got from him "had" to be boiled or they would self-destruct. (But I didnt boil, instead I cut them into smaller pieces.)
I see you are in Nashville. Do you ever get over to the Knoxville area? I have need for an arborist to work on some fruit trees when the season is right. (Besides being no good at that, I'm not allowed to climb anymore, not even a ladder!) I have a tree guy cut where needed but he only cut trees down or trims the limbs I point to with a green laser.)
JKJ
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Stick with twice turning bowls. You’ll get few cracks the better your bowls are.
Unfortunately the deck is stacked a bit against beginners.
You will have increasing success as you turn more and learn more.
Experienced greenwood turners rarely lose a piece to cracking.
You can often skip a year or two ahead in experiment level with a quality class.
Beginners lose a fair percentage that decreases rapidly over as they gain skills. This is a key slide from my working with green wood demo. Beginners often don’t do well on more than half the bullet points.
A thread on Greenwood’s turning. With all the notes, video roughingva bowl, video returning a dried warped bowl
Does anyone seal again a few months later—I.e. after the initial Anchorseal application? If so, what parameters to decode?
There are innumerable methods and combinations of tricks that turners use to get wood to dry without cracking. Some of it is climate. A lot of it is voodoo. I recommend you get advice from folks in your general geography (if I understand how TN is built, John's way the heck the other side o' the holler from you but probably it would be similar), try out the suggestions you get, mix and match, and eventually you will hit on a system that works.