It's been an uncharacteristically wet June and early July in your (and my) part of the midwest, but not as hot as usual. I think if it was hotter, there might be less mold. I've given up on running the fans in my solar kiln until we get steady sun with temperatures in the 90's. Nice ray fleck on the second board up. I've never sawed sycamore but understand it can be very pretty when quarter-sawn. Do you have luck marketing hickory? I know it is on the market, but recently discussed the subject with a cabinet-maker who used it once and said "never again."

I remember working on a house once where most of the trim was hickory. If I recall correctly, I had to pre-drill most of the holes because my nail gun wouldn't set the nails in the wood. Superb to shape, but tough to nail.

When it comes to stickers you end up with a very large no. of them and my experience has been make them all the same size to avoide sorting or getting them mixed up.

Bill

I have been reading comments and this is first post. I have a LM2000 on a 40 acre tree farm in South Carolina. I saw pine, oak, hickory and black cherry. I grow black walnut. I also make rustic tables, benches and other furniture.When I saw I saw the slabs into stickers. I usually saw 3/4 or 1 inch for rustic furniture. Thus I saw the slabs 3/4 or 1 inch to make stickers 3/4 X 3/4" or 3/4 X 1". I can then sticker boards mostly with 3/4" stickers, but sometimes I saw a log to both thicknesses, so when I stack, if I have a  mix of 3/4" and 1" boards for a final layer or two, I can take a short 1 inch thick sticker to make it match height to add a 3/4 inch board beside the 1 " boards or vice versa. Just be sure you do not mix the two thicknesses in one layer. By sawing the 1" slabs to 3/4" thick stickers, I can easily turn it a quarter turn if I did put a 1" sticker in a 3/4" layer of boards.

It's been one of the wettest summers I can ever remember here in Western NY.  I cut some 2" beech slabs & stacked & stickered it in my steel building / workshop.  I used 1" stickers & placed a fan in the near vicinity to facilitate some air flow.  After 2-days, I could have used a straight razor to shave the white mold off of them.  The tree was a blowover, but was not touching the ground.  I estimate it was down for about 6-months.   Anyone have any ideas on how to possibly avoid or at least diminish this ?

Dave the maple I just cut a couple wks. ago did the same thing but was only 1" boards. By the time I cut the second one a few days ago the first one was drying out but I had flipped them every day for the first few days the fuzz was going. Yours being 2" thick may take a llittle longer for the surface to dry enough to check the mold.

Baron....almost a bit too much information there.....sponges and all......

I had my steel building spray foamed this summer.  I am currently putting a wood burning stove in.  Just waiting for the permit from the code officer.  I am going to try stacking all the air dried lumber inside the workshop & getting it real warm inside for a few days.  I have several ceiling fans as well as a couple of regular fans & am hoping I can somewhat speed up the drying process by running the fans & keeping the stove stoked for a few days.  At the very least, it should curtail the beard growing contest some of the lumber has been having.

On the other hand...if I let the fuzz grow for an extended spell...do you guys think the slabs may develop some spalt if I did not let it go too far & turn the slab punky ?

It may be worth a try Dave to set a few aside and see what happens but you'll have to remove the stickers and lay the boards on top of each other. It takes quite a while before they get punky but I'd sure keep an eye on them every mon. or so.

Thanks Bill.  Good idea to remove the stickers & dead stack for a while.

Anyone have any thoughts about the "hot shop" idea ?

Air moisture content is a function of temperature, so as you heat air it's relative humidity drops; so heating the air in the shop will promote drying by reducing the RH, in turn pulling moisture from the wood.  The trick is to remove the humidity from the air before letting the shop cool, to prevent the extracted moisture from condensing out all over, not to mention the rise in RH in the air in general as it cools.  When you have the shop up to temperature, run a dehumidifier flat out and extract as much of that water as possible.  drain it outside.  Keep it running as you lower the temperature, until you reach about 50 F.  At that point, the dehumidifier is at risk of freezeup, so you'll need to monitor it. 

Another way to get rid of that moist air is to vent it to the outdoors, allowing cooler outdoor air in for replacement.  Increases the amount of energy required to hold the temperature, but avoids the humidifier.  You can cycle the hot-cold air scenario repeatedly, and it should do a good job of pulling moisture from the wood - at the cost of the energy involved.

This is how we dry out our cottage at the end of a winter visit - heat the place up with a roaring fire (use short term wood, like a stack of dry kindling, so there isn't a long run-time), then open the windows and doors and do a complete air exchange with that sub-zero air.  Shut down the fire, keep exhausting until the place is cold, then close it up.  Noting worse than a cottage full of warm moisture-laden air buttoned up for the winter.  In the spring, you get that classic 'cottage' odor.

Never brought it up before now but the last maple I milled up had the same white fuzz on it the following day but by the time I remembered to bring a camera it had disappeared . From the log a made up a few doz. bowl blanks for the lathe I'm drying in plastic bags that I turn inside out every day . Condensation builds up on the plastic and the bags slow the drying process down the last ones I did took 4 or 5 months . About 1/2 the blanks have these mushrooms growing on them .

Some are all ready dry enough they have dried up and fallen off, this is after 6 wks. Within the next few wks. the moisture content should be low enough to deal with the fungus. There are also some large blanks I kept out of the sun and are now on top of my wood pile at the shop I'm hoping the frost will suck a lot of the moisture out without creating cracks in them.

So I have got the wood stove in the steel building & have kept a fire fairly steady for about a month now.  The humidity in the building has dropped from the high 70s to the high 40s now.  When I first started burning the stove, there was a cloud of moisture in the building for 2 days. It was actually foggy.  I had to keep opening the doors & windows to exchange the air.  Probably from all the moisture in all the wood I stacked in there. The wood I air dried for about 6 months outside was @ 20 average sampling per my moisture meter.  It is down to 14 average now.  Some slightly higher, some slightly lower.  Looks like the idea has some merit.  Not to mention it's so much nicer working in the shop now. 

By the way......where is the Fall - Winter issue of Norwood News ?

Hey fellow sawyers, I am noticing that my well stickered pine boards and beams that were sawn in the last month are developing blue stain, not all but some. It's all undercover in the barn with lots of ventilation. This has been one rainy month of June, every other day it seems. Is this the contributing factor or is it the fungus I have been reading about. Any solutions other than running a fan on the stack. Will bleaching the boards help? Thanks for any comments or help you may have.

Were they fresh logs when sawn, or had they been down for a while?  My experience is, if you saw them fresh, no problem.  If they sit around in log form, it's a race against both the blue stain and the pine sawyer grubs.  Probably depends on the weather at that point, the bugs are more active in the sun, but I expect the fungus that causes the blue stain is more active in the wet.  Pine and spruce are now on my "saw immediately, or don't accept the log" list - I'm sawing 30-odd spruce poles that have been in the yard for almost a year, and they're a mess due to grubs.  Same with the single pine log from the same cutting, grubs and blue stain as well.  It'll be okay for the back wall of the shed, though.  My guess is, if the fungus is already in the bark when you saw, the blade itself will spread the fungus across the surface.  Not sure what would help then, maybe pine sol as a disinfectant?  Just speculation.

If you sawed fresh logs and you've got blue stain, then it's got to be storage, but I can't suggest what you might do better.

I should have mentioned, the sawyer grubs enter through the bark - so once sawn, make sure you peel all waney edges!  If you do that, you shouldn't see grubs in your planks - but the slabwood will be overrun with them.  I made the mistake of taking some of that slabwood into the house three winters ago for starting wood.  Crunch, crunch, crunch began as soon as the wood thawed.