Timber Framers Guild Forums General Off Topic Another sappy story

Yes at something just above 160 the resin would become liquid again until the next volatile fraction was driven off. It would be the same as a refinery where the crude oil is heated and the different hydrocarbon fractions are tapped off.. LP Gas, gasoline, diesel, tar, wax, asphalt.

The next common kiln schedules have a final "step" at 180*F. For softwoods, especially Southern Yellow Pine many large outfits run a high temperature kiln that operates above 212*F. That is not because the pitch needs to be set that high but because heat speeds up drying and those pines can tolerate rapid drying. Higher kiln temps do darken lighter colored woods.

This link is to an interesting older article on turpentine production with pictures of the process. It goes on in later pages to discuss the various termperatures that produce each fraction from the pine resin;
http://chestofbooks.com/health/aromather...Turpentine.html
(the colophony mentioned in the article is the older name for what we call rosin, the hard final result of the process that fiddlers use to rosin up their bow. We use "resin" for liquid pitch and "rosin" for the hardened fully set product from which no further volatile compounds can be extracted.

For the other ideas this is where I guess I think scientifically to try to temper my thinking. All I can rationally say is "I do not know". There may be studies that I don't know about that have proven one way or another with repeatability what is at work there. In that case there would be an understanding of how it really works. I offered one hypothesis, a souped up guess, but it certainly doesn't make it true that water rinses out sugar or starch or that planting by the signs has any effect. One hypothesis I have heard with regards to planting by the signs is that it has no effect but that any farmer that pays that close attention is probably taking real good care of his crops. I can see that as being one reasonable explanation.

Don – I can’t speak to the chemical composition of or the seasonal levels of those chemicals in the sap of any particular specie, but only to the seasonal changes both in the wood, and in the local forest economy as I observe and understand it to be.

The last few days are a good example of this. The snowpak has been thinning as fast as the mud is getting deep. The smell of woodsmoke is still heavy in the air despite the last few days and nights being the warmest we’ve seen since October, both because sap is running in the sugarbush and some are spending their nights tending the evaporators, and because folks are burning windfall slash from an icestorm early this winter while there is still snow on the ground. When the white is gone such fires will be taboo until the world turns green again.

There’s a landing a half mile down the road, loaded up with sawlogs, a skidder sits next to the pile. Nobody has touched either in ten days or better, and nobody will for another three weeks at best. Weight limits are posted on all the secondary roads while the frost falls out of the ground. Happily this coincides with the same six weeks in the year when mechanized logging might should be suspended.

Log yards at all the area mills are piled high with wintercut, hundreds of thousands of board feet, some in the millions, (the biggest mill in my town produces 2.8 MMBF annually) but most of it won’t be touched till midsummer by anything more than the sprinklers placed to deny the beasties of oxygen. As soon as the trucks start rolling for the mills again, the spring and early summer wood they carry will hit the debarkers within days of hitting the yard. While this yes, is due to the seasonal shifts in chemical composition that leave wintercut less hospitable to the fungi that cause sapstain…

This is not the only reason wintercut timber was historically and is still is held in higher regard than that from the rest of the year.

There clearly are internal things happening seasonally. This is most easily recognized and exemplified by the rapid growth that will soon be happening in cambium layers that will have bark peeling at a sideways glance instead of clinging like burdocks

My personal observations of the wood itself – I have stuck it with quality meters meant for timber and it does tend to be slightly (2-4%) lower in MC, The pines do not bleed the little beads of sap (the talk of sticky on the other thread which elicited my comments) that spring and summer wood does.

Most importantly, though I don’t know why, I believe it is quicker to give up its bound water. This belief is based on observation, and attempts to have a ready supply of dry brace stock, and keeping a stock of small scantling FOHC. It seems to thoroughly season in just one summer if wintercut, while recognizable curves which I know to have been harvested in other seasons, hold onto their weight much longer.

Anyway, this is just me, trying to be in tune with the material I use and the world it comes from, and my belief that it is part of how to best engage in the discipline of green woodworking that timberframing is.

Nice post Will... inasmuch for the writing as the content.

"trying to be in tune..."


Our neck of the woods here on Sebago Lake is going through similar transformations. The lake is rising and the ice is beoming a granular gray, receding from the shoreline. Our dirt road is soft w/ mud...thick ice w/ caverns carved out by the melt water are still in the pine-shaded curves. And wood smoke rises from the chimney most days.

Any day now I'll hear the first loon who replaces the bald eagle, which fished here in the open brook all winter. But he does not like the summer gests.

The shore is thick w/ great pines, standing sentinel like living posts awaiting a proper structure. The eagle is a fine forester; he has surveyed these woods in the quiet hours...

I just found this, Don. Thanks for the clarification...

Thanks for the compliment…

Just me trying to descriptive about what I see around me.

I was in part trying to describe a northern winter and how three plus months of temps seldom above freezing, do affect both the trees and forestry. Having spent last winter in Virginia, and a couple more a few years back in a house that literally straddled the Blue Ridge Divide, I have some sense of how different and yet how the same things can be.

Spent part of this past winter in Wisconsin, and was a little surprised to learn it is colder than here but sees less snow. Winter plays heavily into the forest economy there also, (even spent some time felling) As a for instance the Tamaracks, when the wet ground that supports them is frozen is the only viable time to harvest.

I even spoke to folks there (granted very green folks) who suggested that it was ecologically irresponsible to log in northern climes when the ground was not frozen.

Thanks for your insights Will, I have always enjoyed your posts here and elsewhere as well.

Our mud season is here also but it goes all the way through the winter. We do not freeze as deeply, we go through freeze/thaw cycles throughout the winter. The grass began to grow this week, and none too soon, the yard around my little mill is a mess. Maple blossoms littered the ground after this last rain and wind. I've had my first run in with a bit of bluestain this past week. We've been under the spring burn ban for about a month and it'll go for about 3 more weeks. Logging continues throughout the year here. The larger local mill saws 10MBF/hour. I'm on the Blue Ridge, looking north I see the Valley and Ridge country, 30 miles from there is the Allegheney Plateau. The rocks beneath my feet are precambrian, I can see what was ancient seabed and the plateau was a forest that is now a bed of coal.

I am always working towards my own understanding. The old timers were certainly not ignorant and were often far better observers than we. I was pretty much following reference materials that came from ivory towers. Those folks can be wrong as well but this is material I've also studied from my teens. Part of my trying to be in tune with the material. What I wrote does seem to mesh with my observations over the years. In all of this I do like to hear other opinions and observations, it makes us all think differently. The ponding part I hadn't thought about in quite some time. My Dutch father in law had talked about seeing the old timers sinking timbers in seawater prior to use in his youth but didn't know the reason why. I've also heard of ponding acid woods to lower the tannins. I don't know more about either.

Heartwood is dead, there is very little change throughout the year in it. The old timers prized heartwood, often removing the sapwood. The early timber also had a lower percentage of sapwood and it was in a narrower band on the slower growing tree. Bluestain, sapstain, does not affect heartwood.

The resistance meters I own and have used say that they are not accurate much above fiber saturation point. They are measuring in the billionths of an ohm and with saturation more variables come into play. They really can't differentiate between a half filled cell lumen and one that is full. They also need to be temperature corrected. When measuring bound water in an empty cell they are accurate. Weight works more accurately throughout the range but trees are individuals, metering or weighing one freshly cut tree in summer and another tree in winter might be analagous to weighing a lean person in spring and a fat one in the fall. It takes a pretty fair sample size to draw meaningful conclusions. In none of that am I saying your observations are wrong, they may be spot on, I'm just offering more to think about.

Our pine does bleed resin whenever it warms up a bit, winter or summer. I changed the picture in my first post to the stump of a tree by the drive that I had to cut and pull over this Febuary, its now late March and it has exuded a fair amount of resin. I moved a 6x6 from it the other day without gloves and regretted it. We are still about 2 months from pine's big growth spurt for the year.

Back to Timbeal's comment, yes oils cut sap where it is impervious to water. I like homemade lye soap with lavender blossoms in it. Side ramble; We were trying an experiment one year using a flame weeder in the garden to keep weeds down. Everything was working pretty well till my wife got to a row of lavender. The row exploded into a running streak of fire. I suspect we could run cars off of lavender oil.

I recall a line of us all chained together trying to get out of one of those WI bogs one winter day when a neighbor down the road from the job thought it was firm enough for him to cross. There are definite advantages to winter logging, I'd rather saw snow than mud anyday.

Tim.
Can you put a finger on the issue number of the Small Farmer's Journal? I've got the last 8 or so years.
Fumble fumble,,

It was maybe.....about.....3 years ago? I can almost picture the cover, it may have had a sketch of a fellow, older, with a hat, not cowboy type but with a full brim, this picture may have been inside with the article, most likely with a black night background and a moon in there somewhere. The title of the article, luna cycles or something? It has been going through my head that I should follow it up, just been busy.

Tim

In addition, I find I am plumper in the spring and leaner in the fall, longer, more active days I guess, age may have something to do with it as well.

Ever notice boards or timber left out in the weather to gray and deteriorate back to the earth, my cedar deck is like this, how the sap wood stays wet longer than the heart? The heart dries faster and or absorbs less water. Is the capillaries in the sap wood of a different structure allowing more water retention? When the log is pond cured the water is allowed into the cell makeup and dissolves the sugary saps and flushes it away. It is also quite amazing how many worms are to be found under the bark in pond cured logs, a different type and they are not cutting into the wood just the under bark layer. The bark also falls off these logs with no effort.

Yes, it is muddy, I have not had to pull anyone out yet, the season is still early up here, though.

Tim

I made the spring/fall comment thinking about critters but yes I'm 10 lbs heavy right now. Longer nights means more blueberry cobbler time for us humans .

Your observations are on the money but the structure of sapwood and heartwood is the same, the cells do not change, they die and are then filled with extractives, those compounds I was rattling off earlier. They make the wood less permeable. In pressure treatment heartwood doesn't get treated, the liquid won't penetrate. Foundation grade treated wood specifies all sapwood for this reason, it can be treated through and through.

The roots, or hyphae, of bluestain fungi go through the cell to cell pits and punch through cell walls making them more permeable as well. Ever notice how much faster blue pine wets out than unstained wood? Blue pine gave us fits in the staining of furniture, it would absorb stain much better than nonblued wood. Bluestain doesn't affect heartwood since there is very little sugar within the lumens there.

If you look at wood design values or span tables it is not broken up as sapwood and heartwood because there is no structural difference in the two. The cells don't change as much as they are simply backfilled with tree poop. There is a practical exception to that for compression in woods with high extractive content but it is not used.

Lots of things enjoy the high sugar/starch layer just under the bark. It's one reason to get the bark off as soon as possible and not to leave any on after sawing. Bark provides hiding places, preserves higher moisture and gives ready access to that food layer.

You can probably see where I make observations and then try to check them to see if they are correct. I made a guess about ponding washing out starch and sugar and I've been wondering how to check it. Looking for research would be the first step. If there is nothing then home experimentation would be a start. Starch would be easy, a sample that was cut in half, one half ponded, one half on shore, dry both, an iodine wash stains starch so should make that obvious. The only way I can think of to check for sugar would be a refractometer like you check fruit sugar content with, you would have to make a slurry of the wood after the treatment. They aren't too expensive, not sure if it would work though. There are probably other ways.

Myth seeks to explain, science seeks to know. By figuring out how to check it out we move from anecdote, which is only slightly more than myth, to true knowledge, that's when I no longer have to say "I don't know". It might sound kinda stuffy but that's when I know I am really in tune with what's going on. From there I can build on a solid foundation.