Keith Outten
02-22-2004, 10:38 AM
Anyone who lives in my vicinity and has a couple of bowl blanks prepared who would like me to put them in the top of my Ebac kiln get in touch with me. I've never done this before but would like to try it and see what happens.
My Ebac dehumidification kiln is full of eight quarter white oak. I have a little room at the top and could set four of five bowl blanks that have been prepped for drying in the top of the kiln. My kiln uses a very slow drying schedule and very little heat so the quality of lumber is much higher than conventional drying. I never coat the ends of boards to prevent cracking...it never checks or cracks if I use very wet lumber, no air drying time at all.
I am probably looking at least a six week drying schedule (8% MC) for the oak. I do have a large ships porthole installed in the end of my kiln that I use to spotcheck each load and do moisture checks periodically so I can check the bowl blanks during the drying cycle. Basically my goal is to see what happens to the bowl blanks and more importantly how high the quality of the blank is after a slow drying cycle. I would like to try a few different species of wood as well and since I am not really much of a turner I don't have any bowl material in my current lumber inventory.
Anyone interested in taking part of this experiment let me know.
My Ebac dehumidification kiln is full of eight quarter white oak. I have a little room at the top and could set four of five bowl blanks that have been prepped for drying in the top of the kiln. My kiln uses a very slow drying schedule and very little heat so the quality of lumber is much higher than conventional drying. I never coat the ends of boards to prevent cracking...it never checks or cracks if I use very wet lumber, no air drying time at all.
I am probably looking at least a six week drying schedule (8% MC) for the oak. I do have a large ships porthole installed in the end of my kiln that I use to spotcheck each load and do moisture checks periodically so I can check the bowl blanks during the drying cycle. Basically my goal is to see what happens to the bowl blanks and more importantly how high the quality of the blank is after a slow drying cycle. I would like to try a few different species of wood as well and since I am not really much of a turner I don't have any bowl material in my current lumber inventory.
Anyone interested in taking part of this experiment let me know.