Air drying question

[joec]

I am buying about 600 bd ft of green lumber (oak and cypress) from a sawmill and taking it back to a building I own (miles away from my shop) for storage and drying. I will sticker it right, but will not have much air movement. This building has ceilings about 15' high, cement block walls, concrete floor, no windows and poor air movement. It does have a old exhaust fan in the ceiling, but no electricity. Just wondering if that is going to be a problem. Any advice appreciated. Also, do I need to paint the ends of each board?

 

[CarvedTones]

You need to seal the ends, preferably with AnchorSeal.

 

[CarvedTones]

BTW, I recently acquired a lot of stock that changes my plans for harvesting wood. I just bought a gallon of AnchorSeal at the last group buy even though I wasn't out of my previous batch as I planned to be putting up a lot of spindle blanks. Since my plans have changed, I would be willing to pass on the gallon for the group buy price of $9 paid as a site donation, but it would have to get from Raleigh to Wilmington somehow (I suspect that will be an easy PE to arrange).

 

[scsmith42]

Joe, cypress and oak have two very different drying rates. Oak needs to dry slowly, and cypress is more forgiving.

One option that you have is to stack the boards vertically against the side of your warehouse for the first month or two, and then stack/sticker them. You will need to alternate the boards every week or so so that a different face is leaning against the side of the barn, else you may get a slight warp in them.

w/o any type of air movement, drying rate will be fairly slow, but they will still dry. Thicker stickers would aid in drying - maybe try ripping some 2 x 4's into stickers so that your distances are 1.5" instead of 3/4".

 

[CarvedTones]

cypress is more forgiving.

That might be an understatement, or I got really lucky. Several years ago, when I knew even less than I do now, I bought a bunch of cypress from a sawyer at a great deal, not even realizing that green wood needed special treatment. I stacked it under my deck with no stickers, near the house so it got some weather protection. I just used it as I needed it. I still have a 2 seater Adirondack on my front porch that was built with it sopping wet; no checks, splits or warps (could use repainting, though ). Replaced bench slats on a park bench from it a few times, used it for segmented scroll projects because it took stain so well, all sorts of stuff. I love that oatmeal smell when you cut it also. Yumm...

Anyway, follow Scott's advise. I probably had the good luck to stumble on to some really stable stuff.