"Fred Holder" wrote in message
...
George,

Have you tried Dave Smith's process?
Why yes, I have, because I am a curious person.

Dave says that the water in the wood mixes
with the aclohol in which it is soaking. The water in the wood is
displaced with
the water alcohol mixture.

Well, not exactly. For short times and close grain, alcohol is lucky to get
much past the surface. Since the two are infinitely miscible, you get a
mutual dilution. No such thing as displacement is going on, unless you
refer to alcohol entering the intercellular spaces, displacing air.

Then the alcohol evaporates faster than water. Thus
drying the wood more quickly.

Nope, consider how they got that alcohol. Differential distillation -
Raoult's law, says alcohol leaves faster than water at the same temperature
and pressure. Water loss is not increased by evaporation of the alcohol.
Might even leave a bit more slowly, since evaporation of the alcohol cools
the medium. Fortunately, depending on the wood, there's not much alcohol in
it.

Whether there is any physical chemistry nor wood
technology reason for why this should work, it does work. Wood will not
dry
completely in less than two weeks from very wet to moisture stability
without
some help and the alcohol seems to give it that help.


Of course it will, and does, all the time in my basement. As you're aware,
people have been regulating the relative humidity, and therefor the drying
of their pieces by various means for years. Of course they've been saddled
with a lot of folklore, like the 10% rule and the inch per year rule, not to
mention the people who seal the inside of a bowl, which is under compression
anyway, and won't split. With face grain boards reaching EMC of 10% in an
average of four months, and end grain losing moisture at roughly 10-15 times
the rate of face grain, it's pretty easy to do the math to compute a time to
dry. Note the face-grain bowl is almost entirely endgrain.

It's easy enough to do a valid evaluation. Take some 1x1 sections from
various places in the log, so that you have differing grain orientations,
crosscut 1" consecutive pieces to go into alcohol or not, then treat them
the same afterward. I have every confidence that your results will mirror
mine, where there was no difference in time to EMC, nor was warp reduced or
modified from the direction predicted by wood technologists based on
orientation of the annual rings.

You need to determine if you indeed do have a dependent variable, and
without such comparison, you can't.