What's In The Newsletter?

• Presidents Report
• Dealing With Wood Movement
• Guild Woodworking Projects
• Steam Bending Program

Presidents Report ...

 The summer is in full swing and I am sure that everyone is enjoying the new found freedom that is slowly coming after our experience with the virus.  One thing that it did was increase the number of people who have found new outlets and interests.  Take golf for instance.  After several years of declining interest and courses closing, there are many new golfers out there having fun and staying safe.  Woodworking has also shown a similar increase in the number of people who have taken up this as a hobby and for some, another source of income.  Our guild has attempted to stay active using virtual meetings and finally offering both in-person and virtual meeting for the past few months.  This has allowed those individuals who are starving for more personal interaction and feel safe to attend the meetings and renew their social interactions with fellow woodworkers.  The virtual capability has allowed those who are not quite ready to mingle to stay in touch.  As conditions change, we look forward to having more people attend our monthly meetings. 

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Fran Foster

President TWWWG

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Dealing With Wood Movement

 There is an excellent article in Issue 276, September 2021, of Wood Magazine on wood movement.  While we are all aware that wood expands and contracts with humidity levels I never really knew about how much it would change.  Different woods species expand and contract at different rates and it also makes a big difference on how the wood was cut; quarter sawn or flat sawn.

Wood Magazine has condensed a U.S, Forest Service’s Products Laboratory (https://www.fpl.fs.fed.us/products/publications/specific_pub.php?posting_id=101356&header_id=p ) report titled Drying And Control Of Moisture Content And Dimensional Changes into this great article.  There is a lot of information in this 24 page article published by the U.S. Forestry Service on such things as how wood moves, difference between air drying and kiln drying.  In fact, take a look at the Forest Service web site.  It has a whole lot of information on wood that I never knew existed.  Check them out at https://www.fpl.fs.fed.us/.

As an example take a piece of Red Oak.  It has a dimensional change in inches per 1 percent change in moisture content of .0016" for a quarter sawn board and more than twice that amount (.0037”) for a flat sawn piece of wood.  As an example in the Wood Magazine article if you took this Red Oak lumber, say a 12” wide board with 8 percent change in moisture you would find that the board grew 0.154” for a quarter sawn board and 0.355” for a flat sawn board. Translating these numbers into our wood working speak 0.154” is more than 1/8” of an inch and 0.355” is more than 5/16” of an inch!  That’s a lot of movement but when you consider where we live and the high humidity levels you can see why you need to take this into account when building some of your projects.

Editor

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Guild Woodworking Projects

Our first project comes from Terry Nienaber.

 I'm in the process of planing some of the pecan rough lumber the guild milled about a year ago at Andy's shop. I have a one-foot wide by eight-foot long sled I use to ride the boards through the planer, shimming as needed to get them flat in their free state.  Working by myself, the infeed and outfeed setup becomes critical with that much weight.  Also, like many woodworkers, my garage has to be very reconfigurable.

For the infeed I picked up a 52" wide adjustable height workbench that was assembled at Home Depot ($230).  The height is adjustable with a crank, works very smoothly, and it pretty handily seems to carry a few hundred pounds.

I'm a bit of a packrat, and I've found old treadmills to be a treasure trove of parts.  I used the two rollers for the track from the last one I took apart as table-top infeed rollers.  They have fantastic bearings, and can easily be stood off with blocks of wood that have grooves cut in the top to receive the "axle."  I used the adjustable workbench to set it a little lower than needed, then shimmed the blocks holding each side of the rollers to dial in the height for a smooth transition, and then clamped them to the tabletop.  Couldn't have been happier...ok, except maybe if I had another one for the outfeed. Maybe next Father's Day?

  You can tell that Terry is an engineer by looking at the creative ways he built the planer sled.

Fran Foster provided us with a picture of a cribbage board that he made.  He hand drilled all of the holes!

Gary Stephens provided us a peak at his pressure treated lumber storage and drying rack housed on the back side of his workshop.  It is designed to survive a category 7 hurricane and is a piece of pressure treated art!

While not elegant in design this outside lumber rack is giving me the ability to get a lot of lumber out of the attic where I cannot see it and out of the shop where I need the room.  I also have a lot of lumber stored in the garage from various wood tree harvesting sessions housed during the pandemic.

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Steam Bending Program

This month’s presentation comes from Mike Jurnigan on steam bending of wood and how he applies it to his building of Windsor chair.  During the presentation Mike will be discussing items like:

Woods that bend and do not bend and why.

How steaming is done and bending failures you are likely to encounter.

How much working time do I have after taking the wood out of the steam box?

How long does the wood need to stay in the jig (drying time) and what about springback?

Many other items are on his discussion list and for the full details please see Fran Foster’s weekend notes.