doublegunshop.com - home Forums General Discussion DoubleGun BBS @ doublegunshop.com Shrinking wood?

Hi Gang:

All of my life I have been taught that wood does not shrink in length. It will only shrink in width and thickness due to the structure of the cell.

Has anybody else been told that this is indeed the case?

TIA,

Franchi

I've had rifle stocks that would move if the sun went behind a cloud.........

For whatever reason, just about the only place where shrinkage is obvious on some old guns I've purchased is in the butt of the stock. I must have 3 I can immediately think of where the metal butt plate is proud on the bottom.

I'm sure there are more but I'm not in the mood to be rumaging around the safe and pulling cases out from other hiding places.

...well I had one that would move if a squirrel farted and raised the global temperature albeit immeasurably. Global warming is real!

Wood moves all the time due to seasonal changes in huymidity,some more than others. The reasaon a lot of the older gunstocks are fairly stable is that thay were air dried for many years and have gone through the seasonal changes.
Todays wood is live one day and in a few weeks is used for gunstocks and furniture. Kiln dried wood is good for the wood merchant who is selling it, but not for you and I.

Put some little blue pills on the bottom of the safe. Should bring it right back.

I've heard this one all my life, too. I don't see how that can be. If wood is dried to, say, 8% moisture content, It doesn't matter how it reaches this content. Yes, fast drying can cause checks, but so can slow drying.

Wood doesn't "know" how it reached the desirable MC. Air drying is a myth, IMO, perpetrated back before moisture meters and they air dried it for years to get it to a working MC.

I have brougt several guns to Colorado from western PA that suffered shrinkage.

Wood may not be conscious but it's a good witness nonetheless. Samples of kiln-dried and air-dried exhibit different working properties and kilning too fast produces case hardening (no relation), honeycombing, and stratified stress. I would guess that most SPF dimensional lumber is case hardened by fast kilning. Rip a 2X down the middle. If there's pronounced closing of the kerf or movement away from the kerf, you've relieved internal stress to produce wooden bananas. Lots of wood butchers will tell you that kilning produces a material that's not quite as tool "friendly" as that produced by air-drying.

jack

I've worked with a lot of hardwood in the "sprining" capacity. In short, I made wooden bows for several years. You cannot get wood down to acceptable levels without kiln drying it to reach target MC.

Only woods with a tolerance for higher MC (like Yew) can make an acceptable bow with air drying for several years. A Yew stave dried in a few days with a drying oven performs as well and works the same. I've worked with both and can't tell any appreciable difference in how the wood responds to tools.

On other woods, like hickory, you MUST dry the wood over heat or it will never work.

All wood will reach the same ambient MC whether finished or not finished. In a house where ambient humidity is pretty low anyway, it can shrink. And probably will.

Heat dries out MC. Cold doesn't, regardless of the ambient humidity.