9 moisture meter in action
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Jan 24, 2024
9 moisture meter in action
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0:00
So I want to show you something that applies to people who have woodworking
0:05
shops like I do and even people doing home renovations especially when it
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comes to laying hardwood flooring and this is the thing here it's a moisture
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meter and it tells you how wet wood is. This one's fairly old I don't know if
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they make this model anymore but essentially it's just a device for
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measuring electrical resistance and I just got a load of cherry in this
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morning. Cherry is one of my favorite woods and I'm making a stair railing out
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of this stuff. It feels dry enough but is it dry because I don't want to mill this
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wood down to final size until it is completely dry and that dryness is
0:49
expressed in moisture content. You can see the scale here for a heating climate
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like where I live in Canada we want wood to be between seven and nine percent
1:00
moisture and this device or anyone like it takes the guesswork out of that. Now
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before I show you how it works I want to show you this little thing because as I
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said this is a device for measuring the electrical resistance of wood. The
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moisture wood is the less electrical resistance and the higher the the little
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needle goes. So in order for this to be accurate it has to be calibrated and
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that's what this thing here is for battery and calibration check. So when I
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put the two prongs on these two screw heads here and I push the button then
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the meter should read 16%. Let's see. It's perfectly calibrated. If it wasn't I
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could use a small screwdriver in here to turn it and that would move the needle
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while I was pressing it and then I would I would know that I'm right on. So about
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an hour ago these were boards now I'm turning them into stair spindles. This
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was the surface that was close to the board. If you can imagine there were a bunch of these they were they were lined up like this. So this was the
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surface that was closest to the surface of the board. I planed it it used to be
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rough and I planed it and now I've also sliced it into thickness for the
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spindles. So this is a surface that used to be deep into the board right here but
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now it's exposed. That's the sort of surface that I want to examine with the
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moisture meter because if I test it up here it might be superficially dry but there could be quite a bit of moisture deep in the board. So this used to be
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deep in the board until a few minutes ago and let's take a look see what we we have. So I'm gonna stick the prongs in press the button and yeah we're well
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within that seven to nine percent safety range. Now I didn't see where this wood
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was stored. It was picked up for me at a warehouse but I can tell for sure that
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this wood was stored in a heated environment. You can have wood that's
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stored in a sheltered but unheated environment for a hundred years and it's
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never going to get drier than 12 to 14 percent. So the fact that we're down to
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seven to nine shows that this was in a heated space. I can proceed with confidence now. Now this is for furniture and woodworking and things but the same
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applies if you're installing wood flooring. It's not unusual for people to
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come to grief with wood flooring. They put it down they don't realize how damp
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it is and then it shrinks and they get all kinds of cracks between the boards
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and there's really nothing you can do in that case. So the trick, see the moisture
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level of the wood you're using and don't do anything significant with it until
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you're in that seven to nine percent critical level
#Construction & Power Tools
#Crafts
#Flooring