Air Dried Sugar Maple

We’ve had a couple of sugar maple logs air drying outdoors for 2 years now. Decided it was time we move them into dry storage. They were weighed down and covered with a sheet of steel roofing to keep the rain and snow off them.

If you look in the background of the photo below, you can see a stack of live edge logs and lumber. That stack and two more like it are headed into the shipping container.

The sugar maple is well dry, as it should be. I wanted to see exactly what the moisture level was so I set the Wagner Moisture Meter for the wood species (maple) and in a few seconds we are ready to get a measurement. The 63 is the number on this meter for sugar maple.

I was quite surprised to see how low the moisture content was for these air dried cookies. They are down to 7.2 % moisture content.

Just as surprised, the live edge lumber is recording quite a low moisture content as well. Some heavy cracking on the ends but I did not coat the ends, and the boards were over 9 ft long to accommodate some loss from cracking.

We didn’t want to leave it out for another winter so we decided to move it indoors, ready for sale or for our own use for projects. Random live edge lumber in 1 inch and 1/2 inch thicknesses. Again, we labelled it with where it came from, the species and the date it was cut on the mill.

For the other stack of sugar maple lumber we decided to keep it horizontal in dry storage, rather than standing. We used the skidsteer and forks to move the stack over closer to the container and then loaded it by hand onto another pallet inside. Re-stickering it as we went.

We added weight to the top and tagged this stack as well. Better than trying to guess later on.

For weight are two spruce mantle boards. One is 4×4 with one live edge, the other is 6×8 with one live edge. Both are over 8ft long. Moisture content at the moment is 16-17%. Lots of character in the live edge for these mantle boards. If only we had a fireplace!!