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What wood seems to move the most while drying

David Wyke

David Wyke

Joined
Nov 22, 2023
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Morganton, NC
I usually turn black walnut, cherry, red cedar, maple, white oak, bradford pear, pecan, and sycamore. I love the look of pecan but it move like crazy while drying. I have some bowls that look like a potato chip. This tenon is out about 5/8” and some bowls out by 3/4”+.
What wood seems to move the most with you?
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Before looking at the list mentioned above I was going to say Beech is the most consistently worse for me. After looking at the list it seems I may be correct. Though an ornamental type of cherry was a close second.
 
Don’t leave madrone (madrona, arbutus) out of this discussion - I’ve heard that it has among the highest quantity of water of the hardwoods. It is a delight to turn wet and watch it contort and twist and even render tears internally as it adjusts itself to a new normal. I have all the images taken daily of a rice bowl turned wet and shot once a day for a little over a month that I’ve intended to assemble into a stop motion video someday. Just need to remember where
I put them…
 
I think it depends on what type of movement we’re talking about. I’ve gotten some really lovely warping from bowls made of red and white oak, which was fantastic. Apple and olive have given me the most issues with cracking, though, so I tend to avoid those woods (though I’ll always make an exception for apple burl 😍).
 
Madrone

A good guide is the shrinkage numbers and the ratio of radial to tangential shrinkage
Hoadly - Understanding Wood has a good explanation of shrinkages

Here are a few woods from the table in the link below

When the ratio gets close to 2 there is more warp. When the shrinkage gets close to 10% there is a lot of shrinkage
You can see that Walnut is well behaved. madrone is crazy. Pecan is moving toward the crazy but still manageable.
Silver maple has a high ratio but the low shrinkage numbers make it manageable.

Hickory, Pecan radial 4.9 tangential 8.9 ratio. 1.8
Walnut, Black radial 5.5 tangential 7.8 ratio. 1.4
Madrone, Pacific radial 5.6 tangential 12.4 ratio. 2.2
Maple, Silver radial 3.0 tangential 7.2 ratio. 2.4


 
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Wally Crawford said:
I tried Persimmon several times and they turned into pretzels. I gave all my Persimmon away.
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Strangely, persimmon has a T/R of 1.4, which is pretty low. But it's volumetric shrinkage is 19%, which is quite high. So while persimmon won't go out of round, it will shrink a lot. That usually leads to cracking. I haven't taken down a good persimmon here yet. The one I cut down was dead and the wood was just an ugly gray.
 
Well, my favorite wood for warping is Pacific Madrone. Partly because there is little predictability in how it will warp. I am not positive, but I think it is related to water content in the wood. I turned one bowl that finished at 22 inch diameter. By the time it was done moving, it was 19 by 26 inches, and kind of a D shape.

robo hippy
 
Beech does have very high shrinkage and a big tangential to radial shrinkage ratio. I saw a house with a beech floor that had huge problems. More or less in general the denser the wood the more the shrinkage. Live oak is well up there. And woods with a high tangential to radial shrinkage ratio tend to warp and crack more.
 
robo hippy said:
Well, my favorite wood for warping is Pacific Madrone. Partly because there is little predictability in how it will warp. I am not positive, but I think it is related to water content in the wood. I turned one bowl that finished at 22 inch diameter. By the time it was done moving, it was 19 by 26 inches, and kind of a D shape.

robo hippy
Click to expand...

Damn.

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It does get used for flooring. You seldom see it for lumber, mostly because of the warping. It can have beautiful reds and browns in it, and some times even black, but always a hint of red or pink. The bugs get into it quickly. I figure it does have some sugar in it. I remember turning some once and the next day finding a bunch of the little sugar ants all over it. Also, it gunks up my tools, and I am crusty after turning a bunch of it. I have found that I get less cracking if I get a tree where the spring sap is running, which is around early March here. Put a fresh cut log into the mill pond and it sinks like a rock.

robo hippy
 
Madrone is a beautiful wood. It’s drawback for me is it’s the only wood I’ve found I am allergic to.
Elm seems to deform the worst for me here in Mississippi.
 
The combined twist, warp and uneven shrinkage of some spalting, but solid, apple that I worked with was amazing and my biggest mover so far.
 
I Agree with apple... Out of all my rough turned bowls and projects from green wood, Apple has, BY FAR, been the highest reject/failure rate. Even dried extremely slowly (Even tried plastic bags with shavings for a few days then poked holes in the bag and wrapped it in brown paper bags to slow down drying time) It deforms by far the worst of all the woods I have worked with so far, develops cracks in crazy places, and one of them split in half all by itself in the drying bags. Those that did survive initially often were so crazily warped that after truing them up (tenon, inside, outside) there was not much left to work with for finishing and shaping, several became funnels. So yeah, Apple's the worst for me.
 
Not positive, but I think the water content in sycamore/plane trees is comparable to the madrone. It has been a while since I got my hands on some sycamore.

robo hippy
 
I returned a dried 11” sycamore bowl in a working with green wood demo
The video is in the tutorials&tips. The extreme warp of sycamore made a nice demo.

In my limited experience with madrone it warps more than sycamore.

You can see the difference in wall thickness for that sycamore bowl when outside has been turned it is in the chuck for hollowing.
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I have found that, with my Sycamore, if I let it sit (and hopefully spalt) for 6-9 months it still turns beautifully and moves a lot less after the first turning.
 
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