Timber drying for stable furniture
Moisture content, kiln cycles, equilibrium moisture, and why we won't accept a slab over 14% MC for furniture work.
Most cracking in a finished piece of furniture is moisture failure, not stress failure. The wood was too wet when it went into your house, it lost moisture, and as it shrank the joints or the panel couldn't accommodate the movement.
The number that matters is moisture content (MC), measured as a percentage of the dry weight. Freshly felled timber sits at 60-100%. Air-dried timber stabilises at around 18-22% depending on climate. Kiln-dried furniture timber is typically 8-12%. Indoor equilibrium moisture in a Sydney house is 10-14% depending on the season.
The rule we apply: if the slab is more than 2-3 percentage points off the equilibrium for where it's going to live, we won't use it. That means we won't accept a slab over 14% MC for interior furniture. If a supplier offers us a "kiln-dried" slab and it pins at 16% on the meter, it goes back.
Practical: every slab we receive gets pinned with a calibrated moisture meter at three points (one end, middle, other end). The values get recorded against the slab in our inventory. Slabs that come in at 12-14% spend 4-6 weeks acclimating in the shop before we touch them. The few we get below 10% are gold, they're ready to work immediately and we charge accordingly.
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