That has me wondering: are the padauk samples with white residue mentioned here not properly/fully kiln dried?
I agree, perhaps the wood had too much moisture.
A lot of purchased wood is not dry, either by kiln or air. I almost never turn wet wood.
I've bought a significant amt of wood directly from importers and it is almost always wet. I don't use any kind of kiln or forced drying, just air dry.
I assume all wood is wet until proven otherwise. I have moisture meters but more accurate is checking dryness by weight. I use a sensitive scale that reads in grams. Weigh the blank, write the date and weight on a piece of tape stuck to the side, then weigh again after a month or a few. If the weight decreases, repeat until the decrease levels out or starts going back up (from seasonal humidity changes.)
My shop wood including the storage areas has heat & air so the humidity doesn't change much.
I usually have 100s of blanks of various sizes drying at any one time. I just track a typical blank of a typical size from a batch I've processed and seal on the ends. I track most expensive purchased exotic blanks, especially if not small and if covered with thick paraffin..
Blanks often take a while to dry. 2x2s in many species are pretty quick unless they they were covered by wax paraffin wax when wet. Then they can take a LONG time to dry. It that case, I let the blanks dry a for a few months then scrape off most of the wax with a card scraper and start the weight tracking. Large blanks can take years.
Remember that a 2x2 can air dry MUCH quicker than a larger blank (depending on species and more)
Another very accurate test can be done in a few hours but it does sacrifice a small piece of wood: The oven-dry method. Cut and remove a small sample away from the ends, weight it on a precise scale (I use a scale that measures to 0.01 gram), then heat it in an oven at a specified temperature. When the weight quita changing the sample is totally dry. Use the starting and final weights and a simple formula to calculate the moisture content of the original blank.
Moisture Content (%) = [(Wet weight - Dry weight) / Dry weight] * 100.
If the original blank is "dry", the calculated EMC should be between 9% and 15% depending on the environment in the storage. Area. This is a quick but may need some things: some kind of oven, a thermocouple and reader or good thermomenter to monitor the oven temperature, the precision scale.
I did this test on one piece of a large batch of ebony that was covered with wax. It was dry.
The dealer said he usually waxes all wood as it comes in. Just because.
JKJ
hi everybody. A member of our group here in Kelowna says he has a white film ( in the photo some of it has been wiped away) appearing on a couple of his bowls and is wondering if anyone might be able to explained. The bowls are made from Padauk (sp?) and the finish is wipe on poly. He uses exclusively wipe on poly and he’s made other bowls from the Padauk and he has not seen the film appear before. Is it the finish? Or the wood? 
www.wood-database.com
