Recognizing dry ready wood

[Mr. Maar]

How to recognize when buying wood if the wood has been dried for enough time (or maybe it should be dried for 9 months more)?

[Bruce Hooke]

If the wood is really green you can often tell by the feel and weight, but you are unlikely to run into such green wood unless you go straight to the sawmill.

Otherwise, to tell how dry the wood is you pretty much need a moisture meter, and if it is a pin type meter you also need permission from the seller to test the wood. This is not likely to be an issue if you are buying hundreds of board feet of lumber. If you are just buying a board or two the seller is less likely to be willing to let you poke holes in his boards.

So, ultimately most of us have to trust the seller.

Once you own the wood, if you have access to an accurate scale, you can oven dry a sample from the board and check the moisture content that way. However, for this to be accurate you need to test a piece from the middle of the board, which means cutting up the board, and you need a pretty accurate scale to get anything better than a rough approximation of the moisture content.

[Mr. Maar]

What does the moisture meter look like?

[Mrleft8]

Looks like a multi tester with evil probes....
Another way to tell if a board is really wet, or really dry is to put your face on it. A wet board will feel decidedly cooler. A dry board will feel warm.

[Bob Smalser]

Originally posted by Mr. Maar:
What does the moisture meter look like?http://delmhorst.com/images/product_collage.gif

http://delmhorst.com/faq.html

If this is the wood you mentioned in a previous thread, if you tell me what species, when it was milled and where it is, we can approximate what moisture content it is at. For example, cedars dry very fast, and oaks dry very slow.

[ 06-01-2005, 07:28 AM: Message edited by: Bob Smalser ]