I bought a beautiful piece of spalted maple on ebay; 8" x10"x5".
It is treated with anchorseal and has been air drying for one year.
My moisture meter shows that the heaviest spalted areas are 16% moisture,
and the firmer spots are 8%.

I am not quite sure what anchorseal is, but presume it is a waxy material to
retard drying?
How do I proceed with this to use it for turning?
Just leave it alone for a few more years?
Rough turn it and let it dry out before finishing?
Or something else?

Thanks.

On Mar 8, 2:16 pm, "Toller" wrote:
I bought a beautiful piece of spalted maple on ebay; 8" x10"x5".
It is treated with anchorseal and has been air drying for one year.
My moisture meter shows that the heaviest spalted areas are 16% moisture,
and the firmer spots are 8%.

I am not quite sure what anchorseal is, but presume it is a waxy material to
retard drying?
How do I proceed with this to use it for turning?
Just leave it alone for a few more years?
Rough turn it and let it dry out before finishing?
Or something else?

Thanks.

Personally, I couldn't wait a year or so for wood to dry. There are
many ways to dry your wood after turning it-microwave, brown paper
bags, sawdust and bags, dish soap, and one that has worked well for
me, alcohol. Here is a link to an easy way to do it with alcohol.
http://alcoholsoaking.blogspot.com/. Most of the technical stuff can
be skipped, just go toward the bottom of the article. I can dry a
roughed out piece approximately the size you have in less than a week,
depending on how thick you make it. Hope this helps. It really is
amazing, especially with a high moisture content. Good Luck.
Marc

http://marcalanfreedman.com/

On Mar 8, 1:16 pm, "Toller" wrote:
I bought a beautiful piece of spalted maple on ebay; 8" x10"x5".
It is treated with anchorseal and has been air drying for one year.
My moisture meter shows that the heaviest spalted areas are 16% moisture,
and the firmer spots are 8%.

I am not quite sure what anchorseal is, but presume it is a waxy material to
retard drying?
How do I proceed with this to use it for turning?
Just leave it alone for a few more years?
Rough turn it and let it dry out before finishing?
Or something else?

Thanks.

On Mar 8, 1:16 pm, "Toller" wrote:
I bought a beautiful piece of spalted maple on ebay; 8" x10"x5".
It is treated with anchorseal and has been air drying for one year.
My moisture meter shows that the heaviest spalted areas are 16% moisture,
and the firmer spots are 8%.

I am not quite sure what anchorseal is, but presume it is a waxy material to
retard drying?
How do I proceed with this to use it for turning?
Just leave it alone for a few more years?
Rough turn it and let it dry out before finishing?
Or something else?

Thanks.

Toller -

Anchorseal a indeed a waxy product made to seal green wood to keep it
from drying too quickly, starting all the bad things that happen when
that starts.

If you are actually reading 8% anywhere, it is certainly stable enough
to turn. I turn some of my stuff that is literally cut from a tree
days before I get it on the lathe. I have turned long enough to
realize, you are going to lose a piece here and there, so I don't
sweat it. I remember when I started a few years back, losing a piece
to cracking and warping was devastating. Now a piece of maple,
cherry, mesquite, oak, or whatever I am turning goes in the smoker if
it is beyond saving, and I don't give it another thought.

I rough turn my pieces to about 90% of their shape and thickness.
Then I label a bag with a date that I did it, and pack the piece in
its own shavings. I close up the bag, leaving a couple of air holes,
and put it on the shelf for a three or four months, then pull it out
and finish it.

With the turners I know, they all bat about 50% on their accelerated
drying methods. Some like the LDD (liquid dish detergent) soak
method, other alcohol, some bag like me, some paper bag with no
shavings, and on and on. A lot depends on your wood and you climate.
It will require your experimentation to figure out which works best
for you.

A nice piece of wood like that needs a little planning. Could you cut
it so you actually got two bowls out of it?

A word on finishing spalted material. One of the joys of spalted
stuff is the ink lines. If you use some high solvent sealers (like
shellac) you will blur those lines. Some oil finishes will as well,
and your spalted material will only look muddy. DAMHIKT.

Try building a couple of light coats of your finsh before you start
building if you finish on the lathe.

Robert

"marcaf" wrote in message
ups.com...
On Mar 8, 2:16 pm, "Toller" wrote:
I bought a beautiful piece of spalted maple on ebay; 8" x10"x5".
It is treated with anchorseal and has been air drying for one year.
My moisture meter shows that the heaviest spalted areas are 16% moisture,
and the firmer spots are 8%.

I am not quite sure what anchorseal is, but presume it is a waxy material
to
retard drying?
How do I proceed with this to use it for turning?
Just leave it alone for a few more years?
Rough turn it and let it dry out before finishing?
Or something else?

Thanks.

Personally, I couldn't wait a year or so for wood to dry. There are
many ways to dry your wood after turning it-microwave, brown paper
bags, sawdust and bags, dish soap, and one that has worked well for
me, alcohol. Here is a link to an easy way to do it with alcohol.
http://alcoholsoaking.blogspot.com/. Most of the technical stuff can
be skipped, just go toward the bottom of the article. I can dry a
roughed out piece approximately the size you have in less than a week,
depending on how thick you make it. Hope this helps. It really is
amazing, especially with a high moisture content. Good Luck.
Marc

There is no "technical stuff" there. Only fluff and pretense.

Wood dries by losing moisture to the air. It loses moisture at a rate it
can support and the air is capable of receiving and dispersing. The
anchorseal is placed on the endgrain to slow the rate of loss, compensating
for a tenfold difference between face and endgrain rates. We do the same by
controlling the relative humidity outside the block in kilns, containers or
higher humidity storage lest we suffer consequences from differential drying
rates.

Sixteen percent is not going to demand special treatment. Even in my dry,
heated winter home the RH equates to nearly eight in the main living space,
so there's only half the original (~30% by weight) loss to go. Rough it
out, leaving an eighth to a quarter inch over the final wall thickness to
compensate for natural shrinkage, more if you have exotic grain directions,
and put it out of the reach of forced air to finish for a couple weeks.
Weigh it, give it four days, weigh it. Really close says you're as good as
it gets. If not, weigh it a week later.

If you are willing to trade time for a bit more security, though it'd have
to be a pretty weird grain pattern to need it at this state, you can
exercise a bit more control by bagging or boxing to slow the rate of loss to
a walk, rather than the crawl an occlusive barrier gives.