drying a huge piece of oak and then....

[david takis]

hello,
my name is dave takis. first of all i will start off by saying i know absolutely nothing about woodworking. i am just here for some advice. i just had 6 huge oaks taken out of my yard, one fell through my house so the rest had to go too. one of the larger rounds was really gorgeous so i cut a chunk off off it to at a later date make a table out of, or more specifically have someone do it for me.
the piece is about 3ft in diameter and about 4 inches thick. right now it is in my basement on four 4x4's. i cut it about 2 weeks ago. my question is, how long before i can have this thing made into a table. i want to leave the natural edge. i cut it this thick as i figured about an inch would have to be planed off. any advice you guys can give would be much appreciated and if you know anyone in or around the atlanta area that would want to tackle this sort of project. thanks agian.

dave takis

[David Hite]

Hate to break the news, but this large disk will probably start to develop radial splits soon. See this site for a pretty good explanaton. http://northernloghome.com/checking.htm

[David Gendron]

I would say you should wax the end grain, to prevent it to split, and let it sit for a few years, so it remain stable and it would make it easyer to work. Air dry is definitly the best way to do it!
Just my $0.02
David

[Mark Norman]

Get some sealer on it yesterday, If it hasn't started checking yet consider yourself lucky.

[Richard M. Wolfe]

Coating it to slow drying or making relief cuts in the bottom may possibly help, but if it doesn't crack you will have a very rare piece of wood.

[David Keller NC]

"the piece is about 3ft in diameter and about 4 inches thick. right now it is in my basement on four 4x4's. i cut it about 2 weeks ago. my question is, how long before i can have this thing made into a table. i want to leave the natural edge. i cut it this thick as i figured about an inch would have to be planed off. any advice you guys can give would be much appreciated and if you know anyone in or around the atlanta area that would want to tackle this sort of project. thanks agian."

David - the unfortunate quick answer is that a round cut out of a red oak log is not a suitable piece of wood for a table. There are several reasons for this. While you can successfully dry it by cutting a a radial line from the outside of the bark directly to the very center (which allows the piece to shrink in a controlled manner - if this isn't done it will develop several of these radial cracks on its own), you will then have to replace the resulting pie-shaped gap.

Even if you do this, the piece will still be quite unstable, as the length of the growth rings on the outside will be something on the order of 12 feet long, and will shrink/expand along this line some 2-3 inches with changes in humdity from the seasons. So unless you leave an open kerf (a cut line) from the outside of the tree all the way into the center, it's guaranteed to crack sometime in the future. Wood, even when "dry", never stops moving, as it's always expanding and contracting with changes in humidity, and that's even with a heavy coat of finish - finish doesn't seal wood, it just slows down the moisture exchange.

OK - now for the coup de grace. Red oak splits incredibly easily along the grain lines - so long as there aren't any knots or forks, one can split a 4 foot long piece 3 feet in diameter with one hard whack of a heavy maul. This is one reason red oak is so prized as firewood.

With a 4" thick piece cut as a round from the log, you can split it just by dropping it - it's that easy. So if you make a table of it with an unsupported center pedestal, someone can simply set something heavy down on it and it will break and fall to pieces. In fact, it may do this just under its own weight.

One might be able to jury-rig a support system underneath the entire thing - such as mounting it on a circle of plywood, but that will still not get around the moisture content change problem and the subsequent cracking/checking.

Sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but I cut a lot of big trees for firewood, and I get requests for this sort of thing (and have to explain the above) at least once with every big tree I cut.