How Wood Moisture Levels May Affect Your Woodworking Project

For anyone who is serious about woodworking it is essential to understand the importance of wood that has been properly dried, and how wood moisture levels can have an adverse effect on your woodworking project.

If you want the wood you are considering for your outdoor project to be usable then it needs to be dried, either in a kiln or air dried, to a moisture level of 19%. If you intend to use it for an indoor project then this figure should be 9%.
The reasons for this are simple: everything about a woodworking project relies on precision, from the way in which the wood is turned to how you join pieces together. The amount of moisture that is in the wood can have a marked effect on this.

Moisture and humidity
Even after it has been harvested it is possible to consider wood as something that is still “alive.”Changes in humidity and the relative moisture in the air can mean that wood is continually contracting and expanding. This means that having the correct moisture content is vital to your project. In an ideal world, the wood that you used would have been stored in an environment that is similar to the one where the finished project will live so that it is subjected to minimal contracting and expanding.

Working in an environment that is climate controlled, where you could also ensure that the humidity and moisture content of the room doesn’t get too low or too high, is a good way in which you can maintain the correct moisture content for your wood. Unfortunately, humidity is not an exact science and the only real way in which you can ensure that you have the correct moisture level in the wood that you are using is to use a moisture meter.

The nature of working with wood
Whether you are building furniture, or your woodworking project involves laying floors, every project needs to take into account what is termed “seasonal movement.” This is where wood expands and contracts with the weather. When the wood that you used has not been prepared properly all sorts of problems can occur that will leave you with less that perfect results. It might be that the wood contracts and becomes too small, in the case of floorboards it could be there is shifting or creaking, and on the other extreme you could find yourself dealing with warping as a result of spikes in humidity.

Whilst wood is a beautiful material to work with and will offer you incredible results, it can be rather fickle.

Keep a note of the moisture levels in the wood that you are working with, and make sure that you allow for shrinkage and expansion as part of your project.

This will help to avoid some of the issues that you will encounter when the moisture levels are not as they should be. Plus, store your wood properly and check the levels of moisture with a meter before you begin to work, and this should help your projects.