How to treat green wood to use for finished lumber?

[Bowtie]

I have been saw ripping my own slabs of mulberry and hedge to make stuff with like lawn furniture, clocks, etc. What does a person do with green rough cut lumber to keep it from splitting, cracking, etc? Is there a cure method or treatment I need to do to preserve the wood?

 

[sawyerDave]

Wood treatments

Single most important thing you can do is to seal the ends of logs with wax emulsion type of sealer like end coat that US coatings , or Baileys sells. Will save a foot of wood at each end. If you are carving, there is a product called PEG, that you dip the partially carved blanks in, it replaces the water in the wood with itself, Woodcraft, others sell it. If you are talking about insects, the best treatment is to get the wood to about 150 degrees for 4-6 hours to kill bugs. I suggest you go over to Woodweb, and do a search on this topic, its about half of what they talk about over there.

 

[Bowtie]

Thanks a lot for the information. Mostly what Im worried about is as the wood dries out is splitting. When I find a suitable piece of wood I will mill it out and quickly cut to size and go to work making it into whatever. I just want to know what needs to be done to keep it from cracking/splitting as it dries out. Thanks for the link!!

 

[John Paul Sanborn]

Part of it is that it is drying too fast, you need to stak it with separating boards (stickers) and let is sit in a cool not too dry location for around a year per inch of thickness to get it to a low humidity.

You could probably get away with less time with outdoor furniture, but the higher the humidity when worked the more movement there will be.

 

[buzz sawyer]

Thanks a lot for the information. Mostly what Im worried about is as the wood dries out is splitting. When I find a suitable piece of wood I will mill it out and quickly cut to size and go to work making it into whatever. I just want to know what needs to be done to keep it from cracking/splitting as it dries out. Thanks for the link!!

If the wood is green, you may need to soak the work in Polyethylene Glycol - PEG, as sawyerDave mentioned. I've done this with a couple turnings and they didn't crack but still warped a little. I don't recommend this for any kind of cabinet work with closely fitted pieces. Unless you're using a very stable wood like catalpa, you're going to get a lot of movement as the wood dries.

 

[Neubauer6]

Use a product called Anchorseal. I just purchased my first gallon and it came to Wisconsin in less than two days! Check it out here: https://www.uccoatings.com/

 

[aquan8tor]

Bowtie, I've milled a fair amount of short boards out of mulberry, out of what would've been someone's firewood. I cut the main section of the trunk into chunks for bowl blanks---beautiful, BTW. The rest was too crooked to get much more than a couple feet straight, but I sawed up all the 12" and larger dia. stuff into boards, quartersawed it all.

Point I'm making, I didn't seal it, b/c of the time it had already been sawn, but had it in a shed away from direct light; it hardly checked at all. I was very surprised. I would definitely seal your boards, however, as the only reason I didn't seal mine was it had already been cut for some time. FWIW, try to keep both those species out of the light if at all possible. It will turn a deep chocolatey reddish brown, but will retain its beautiful yellow color for a while if its kept out of direct sunlight. I haven't personally worked with osage, only mulberry. I'm under the impression they are somewhat similar, osage, or hedge apple, is harder, and the older darkened stuff I've seen is quite a bit redder than the mulberry I have that's changed to the chocolate-yellow brown.

 

[Bowtie]

I like mulberry better for appearance. Hedge is harder, and less attractive in my opinion. Thanks for the replies! Im going to try a lawn bench for my concrete stamped front porch and see how it goes. i found 2 huge old mulberry trees in a farmers pasture that he is happy to let me take down. Most will be firewood, but Im gonna save the straight, big pieces of the trunk if the damn carpenter ants havent ruined them.

 

[arbadacarba]

Save some money

If you dont want to spend the money on PEG a lot of turners now use simple hand dish washing liquid. I was skeptical at first, but found it was less subject to ooze than PEG unless you use the higher temperature resistant PEG. The process is the same - water is replaced by the solids in the immersion liquid.

 

[buzz sawyer]

If you dont want to spend the money on PEG a lot of turners now use simple hand dish washing liquid. I was skeptical at first, but found it was less subject to ooze than PEG unless you use the higher temperature resistant PEG. The process is the same - water is replaced by the solids in the immersion liquid.

Hmm...I don't know - don't want to get dishpan hands at this point in life. :hmm3grin2orange: