"Fred Holder" wrote in message
...
Well George, thank God that you weren't the judge when some of the great
discoveries of our time were being discussed, not on a newsgroup of
course. It
never ceases to amaze me how some people can be so critical of a process
that
works very well. It has even worked well on madrone for my wife and I. She
definitely doesn't wear and ionized braclet or use the dish detergent
except to
wash dishes. I don't care if you ever take advantage of the alcohol drying
process (and hope you don't enjoy the benefits of it), but I hate to see
you
debunk it and maybe keep others from trying it to get good results with
their
wood drying.


Well, I have to say the scientific method employed seems a bit dubious,
Fred.

I was, however able to duplicate your results yesterday.

Took a plate of wet dirt - it's been raining, and carefully monitored and
recorded the data so I could look like _I_ knew something too.

0800 145 grams
1000 138 grams
1200 124 grams
1400 116 grams
1600 114 grams

Stable thereafter. So, based on your experimental results and mine, I'll
have to concede that if you put something wet where air can get to it, it'll
lose weight, and it seems to be from loss of moisture.

Ran a parallel experiment to document whether or not this was the case. Put
the dogs' dish on the counter out of reach and measured an 18mm depth of
water at 0800 , and 17mm at 1800 when the dirt was stable. Couldn't have
lost anything but water, so I consider that it might have been the case with
the dirt.

Since I formed the wet dirt on to the bottom of a paper plate, I have to say
that, subjectively at least, there seemed to be little distortion during the
process.