Air drying costs the sawyer time but generally no money, so its cheaper than kiln drying. If a sawyer can purchase a log, or has access to their own wood, they can produce slabs to be air dried for not a lot of money, so they can sell the slabs cheap. But cheap isn't the best route when you're making indoor furniture.
Kiln drying lumber increases the cost of production due to both purchasing the kiln and running it. Kilns are not cheap but once a wood product is properly kiln dried it produces a substantially better end product then air drying.
At Maine Urban Timber Company, we don’t sell air dried lumber. We utilize an iDry vacuum kiln which has the capability to kiln dry thick slab lumber. Our slabs can be used for an indoor piece of furniture and will be more stable than any air dried piece of lumber.
If you are going to spend the time, energy and cost to build a piece of furniture, its important to use the right material. Kiln dried slabs will produce the best end result and will save you time, energy and money from having to redo the project.
]]>Slabs are no different than traditional lumber, other than the fact they are much larger. They still need to have flat, co-planer sides so when you make your live edge table, island top or other project you have a good platform to start from.
When you mill lumber to two co-planer sides, you need two tools, a jointer and a planer. The jointer starts by making a flat surface on one side of the board. The flat side is then used as a reference surface and put into the jointer, which then gives you your second flat, co-planer side.
The issue with this, once you buy a large slab, is that you can’t run a 36 inch piece of wood over a 6 inch jointer and then try and run it through a 13 inch planer. It just won’t fit!
So how can you flatten your live edge slab? Once you have your slab in hand, you have two options:
The first is to flatten the slab yourself. This method requires you to make a jig out of 2 x 4’s that is larger than your slab. You will level out your slab on your shop floor and use the jig to run a router over the slab, over and over (and over) again, until you have the entire side flattened. You then take the slab and flip it to put your flat face down, and then flatten the second side. Although this is a method you can do at home, it can take a while to build your jig and when you are done with it you have to store it somewhere. A second (in my opinion) bigger disadvantage of this method is the clean up. Most hand held routers don’t have decent dust collection methods so when you are flattening the slab, dust will go E.V.E.R.Y.W.H.E.R.E! The bigger the slab, the more mess you make.
The second method is that we flatten the slab for you! We use our five foot by 13 foot CNC machine to flatten both sides to equal thickness. This means that all you have to do is pay us for our flattening service and when its done, you come pick it up. No mess to clean, no jigs to build, just come pick up your slab. When we flatten your slab, we don’t do it all at once. We will remove thickness from both sides and then let it sit for a couple of days. This allows the live edge slab to move if its going to. Once its made any movement
When we flatten your slabs for you when can get them to a specific height and when they are returned they are sand ready.
Contact us with your slab flattening needs! We can help you out.
]]>Urban lumber still allows the user to get quality wood but in ways that traditional lumber cannot compete. Urban lumber allows us at Maine Urban Timber Company to produce a product with five distinct advantages over “normal” lumber.
Provenance: When you pick up some lumber from Lowes, do you know where it comes from? Of course not. At Maine Urban Timber company, we track where our lumber comes from all the way to the point of sale. When you pick up your live edge slab lumber, you will know where in Maine it comes from, down to the street. You cannot do that with regular lumber.
History: Some trees are more than just a tree from a city or a front yard. Certain trees have historical significance. Wouldn’t it be awesome to have a live edge slab from a tree at a local university planted by the class 1915? How about lumber to make a table that was planted by a historical city figure. It would make that table an even more impressive piece once completed.
Figure, color and dimension: You can still get the wood that you can buy commercially with urban lumber but with much more character. Urban live edge slab lumber gives you wood with figure and colors that are normally removed from commercial products. The figure that comes around crotch figure is beautiful and would specifically be cut out of commercial products. If color and figure were not enough, the dimensions of urban slab lumber is significantly larger. At Maine Urban Timber Company, we can cut up a 45” diameter tree which can give us slab lumber over 40” wide. You will not be able to get that at any commercial lumber store and it will be difficult to find it anywhere else in Maine.
Community meaning: At Maine Urban Timber Company, we track our lumber from the time of cutting it down to the point of sale. This allows us to return trees from specific parts of a town to its residence to be used in furniture pieces or to a local community center to be enjoyed by all. Wouldn’t it be great to have live edge mantel from a tree in your town or a coffee table from a tree in the community park.
Personal meaning: How many people have a tree that a family member planted or has special meaning. If a storm blows it over, keep that special part of the tree alive by making the tree into lumber and building something. Having a beautiful dining room table is one thing, but having the table made from the oak tree that you played in as a child is another.
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All the slabs that are sold by Maine Urban Timber Company are kiln dried to an average moisture content of 6-8% which makes the wood more stable and kills all the bugs that once lived in the wood.
]]>What is the basic idea of kiln drying? I’ll use an analogy to explain. Kiln drying lumber is the same premise as toasting a piece of bread. You start off with one product, add heat and end up with another product.
Air drying lumber is like putting a piece of bread on your counter for several months. The bread will dry out a bit compared to what it was when it was fresh, but it will never become toast. Toast is bread, but with heat added. The heat cooks the bread, reduces the moisture content of the bread below what was possible with just leaving the toast on the counter and changes the properties of the initial piece of bread. Once that piece of toast is cooked, its pretty hard and doesn’t accept moisture as easily because it’s been cooked. See the difference?
If kiln drying is better why are most slabs not kiln dried? Two main reasons.
#1 – Kilns are a substantial investment and are expensive to run. Kiln operation is also a bit of an art and isn’t something you just “do.” If you don’t run your kiln properly, the pieces of lumber you spent months or years waiting to be a finished product could be ruined.
#2 – The overall drying time for thick slab lumber (think two or three inches thick), from the day of sawing until the day they are down to below 8% moisture content can be a year plus with traditional dehumidification kilns. That is a long time to keep lumber on hand and requires a large area to store all the live edge slabs while they air dry, waiting their turn for the kiln.
What is the downside of using green, non-kiln dried wood in your indoor furniture? Two BIG issues:
#1 – Wood is an organic product, and it moves with the seasons. The bigger the piece of wood (picture a 40 inch wide by eight foot long live edge slab table top), the more potential it has to move. Why do you care if your table moves? Imagine putting a full glass of hot tea on your tabletop and it spills because your top is no longer flat. Can you picture eating from a plate that constantly wobbles because your tabletop is so badly cupped? It takes a long time to get a large piece of slab lumber flat. Even if you flatten a piece of green, non-kiln dried lumber, it will move when the seasons change and the moisture in the air increases or decreases. This will magnify in winter when the moisture content drops, and your lumber is heated by your house and it dries out further. As the slab continues to dry, the lumber will move.
When you air dry lumber (no heat added), the lumber will only obtain the moisture content of the surrounding air. In the New England area, that is around 12-13%. During winter, the air dries out and we heat our houses, causing the air in our houses to dry even further. This will slowly dry that lumber and can wreak havoc on your slab surface.
If you built your furniture, this means you spent hours (and hours) flattening, sanding and finishing your tabletop just to have it move and no longer be flat. If you purchased your live edge slab furniture, this means that you spend (most likely) a good amount of money of a piece of furniture that now doesn’t function very well.
#2 – Bugs! That’s right, bugs…on the wood…in your house. The USDA recommends that lumber be heated above 135 degrees at its core for a minimal amount of time to kill any bugs inside. This means that the kiln temperature must be above that to reach an internal temp of 135 degrees.
So how can we help you with your live edge slab project?
Maine Urban Timber Company sources their slabs from trees removed from urban and residential environments. We cut the trees into slab lumber and then dry them in our vacuum kiln. Our specialty vacuum kiln allows us to dry thick slab lumber in weeks rather than months and gets to temperatures high enough to kill all bugs that once called the lumber home.
Maine Urban Timber Company specializes in Maine hardwood live edge slabs that have been kiln dried to below 8% moisture content. We also keep track of where in Maine our live edge slabs come from so when you buy a slab from us you’ll know where that tree once stood. We also carry hardwood slab lumber from Maine trees that aren’t commercially available.
Are you working on a live edge table, need live edge shelves or want to install live edge slab countertops? Maine Urban Timber Company has what you need. Get in touch with us to see what we have and what you need for your next hardwood live edge slab project.
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