Tip #39
Drying Your Own Lumber (continued)
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Air-drying - Pros & Cons

The main advantage to air-drying lumber is that you can do it yourself for free. Once you’ve built a drying rack, your only cost is for transportation from the sawmill. And you’ll find that the price of green lumber at the sawmill is substantially lower than dried lumber from the kiln or the or the distributor. In some cases, it may be several dollars per board foot lower. This will vary quite a bit, depending on the type of wood and the area of the country, but the savings will be attractive in any case.

There are three disadvantages to air-drying lumber. The first is that it requires space. Five hundred board feet of lumber will make a stack 4’ wide by 8’ long by 2½’ tall. The second disadvantage is that it takes time. Generally speaking it takes a year to dry a 4/4 (1" thick) board, 2¼ years for an 8/4 board, and four to five years for a 12/4 board.

The third disadvantage is that air-drying doesn’t remove as much moisture from the wood as kiln-drying, and the wood is less stable. However, if you carefully design and build your projects to allow for the movement of the wood, this shouldn’t be a problem.

Tip -- The old masters had to work with air-dried wood exclusively -- there were no kilns. They controlled the tendency of the wood to expand and contract by finishing both the inside and outside of their completed pieces. They were also careful to apply just as many coats of finish to the inside as the outside. This way, the wood "breathed" the moisture in and out evenly on all sides of the boards as the humidity changed. The boards expanded and contracted at the same rate on all sides, and there was little tendency for the wood to warp or twist.

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