# drying a burl



## owlelope (Jan 29, 2009)

I have a friend who has got some burls. What is the best way to dry them so they don't crack?


----------



## john lucas (Sep 18, 2007)

It's tough to dry thick pieces of solid wood. The best way by far is to rough turn it into something, either a bowl or hollow vessel and then let it dry and re-turn it after it's dry.
I have had pretty good luck saving wood (notice I didn't say drying) by coating the ends with wax or End grain sealer. I've had moderate luck covering the pieces with stretch wrap. What this does is slow down the drying tremendously so that it dries more evenly. Normally on logs I simply coat the end grain. However on a burl you don't know where the end grain necessarily is so you would have to coat the whole thing which really really really slows down the drying. For the most part what I am accomplishing by coating the end grain with sealer is to preserve the log long enough for me to finally get around to roughing it. It will still have a lot of water even a year or more down the line and will turn like green wood. They do get lighter so I know that they are losing water but they still turn like green wood and move like green wood.


----------



## 9thousandfeet (Dec 28, 2014)

I've never had any success worth mentioning trying to dry wood, any kind of wood, in log form or in big chunks (like burls).
Like John, if I can't get to a piece of fresh wood within a few days and rough turn it, I'll find a way to arrest drying so I can store it for a while until I can. Anchorseal works. Burying wood in a snowbank works. Floating logs in water works too, which is what we used to do back when I owned a sawmill and had a pond. Storing chunks of wood in plastic lawn/leaf bags works also, but you have to watch out for mold.

Nowadays, I rough turn ASAP, paint anchorseal on the rim and exterior of bowls, and dry them that way. Peppermill and other spindle oriented blanks I dry in the square or rough-turned (oversize) to round with the ends dipped in anchorseal.

I also turn green wood all the way to a finished bowl if I think the subsequent warping will make for an interesting result, and that can work with some burls to wonderful effect, but that's something I do probably not more than 5% of the time.


----------



## Bill Boehme (Feb 9, 2014)

You don't need to coat the exterior surface of a burl (this would be obvious since it wasn't coated while on the tree). It would be a good idea to coat all the sawn parts. I bought some Australian burls and they came wrapped in plastic stretch wrap. The wood wasn't guaranteed to be dry, but I found that for all practical purposes it was as dry as it needed to be. To minimize shipping costs, the wood is essentially dry before being shipped from Australia to the dealer here in the US.

For a true burl, the cracking doesn't seem to be much of a problem for me. Most cracks that do develop are generally small because of the wild grain pattern. Sometimes a healed-over dead limb knot that protrudes from the trunk is mistaken for a burl. Those faux burls don't have the same kind of wild grain pattern as a true burl and cracking during drying can be a big problem with that type of "burl".

At any rate, I agree with the others about rough turning the wood while it is fresh and then coating all of the cut surfaces with Anchorseal or equivalent.


----------



## Jerry Maske (Dec 29, 2013)

Burls, like all woods, dry at their own rate and pleasure, or DISPLEASURE. There's so many variables at work that it's hard to know where to begin, but you've gotten some good advice. Here's mine.

I live along the coast of Maine, far enough up that 150" of snow isn't an unusual winter. And inadvertently DID bury some logs in a snow bank. Rock Maple and it's just as wet and nasty today as it was last October.

I've gotten several pieces of Monkey Pod and Avocado from Hawaii. A friend cut them down around December and shipped pieces to me. Both went off the scale on my moisture meter. All were coated in Anchor seal and cut to 12x12x6" and about half had "Checks" severe enough I had some serious chain saw work to do. 

The Avocado, however, dries like it wants to be in Maine. I rough turn it, no Anchor Seal, set it out on a shelf and in a month, it's dry enough to finish. Yes, it does warp, but if you leave a wide wall, say an inch, there's enough to get the warp out. The Monkey Pod is at the other end of the spectrum. Magnificent wood so I Anchor sealed all of it when I rough turned it a month ago and it is still at the same "Off the Scale" moisture content. No clue how long it will take.

I've read everything I can find about Curing, or Drying wood and it seems to boil down to experiment. Try all the methods but remember; NOTHING will work with all woods everywhere. Richard Raffin says he rough turns a log as fast as he can and just puts them in a pile. He does this for a living and still says he looses a few every month. So, try all the tricks and make up a few as you go along. You never know what will work, until it doesn't.


----------

