9 moisture meter in action

So I want to show you something that applies to people who have woodworking

shops like I do and even people doing home renovations especially when it

comes to laying hardwood flooring and this is the thing here it's a moisture

meter and it tells you how wet wood is. This one's fairly old I don't know if

they make this model anymore but essentially it's just a device for

measuring electrical resistance and I just got a load of cherry in this

morning. Cherry is one of my favorite woods and I'm making a stair railing out

of this stuff. It feels dry enough but is it dry because I don't want to mill this

wood down to final size until it is completely dry and that dryness is

expressed in moisture content. You can see the scale here for a heating climate

like where I live in Canada we want wood to be between seven and nine percent

moisture and this device or anyone like it takes the guesswork out of that. Now

before I show you how it works I want to show you this little thing because as I

said this is a device for measuring the electrical resistance of wood. The

moisture wood is the less electrical resistance and the higher the the little

needle goes. So in order for this to be accurate it has to be calibrated and

that's what this thing here is for battery and calibration check. So when I

put the two prongs on these two screw heads here and I push the button then

the meter should read 16%. Let's see. It's perfectly calibrated. If it wasn't I

could use a small screwdriver in here to turn it and that would move the needle

while I was pressing it and then I would I would know that I'm right on. So about

an hour ago these were boards now I'm turning them into stair spindles. This

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

surface that was closest to the surface of the board. I planed it it used to be

rough and I planed it and now I've also sliced it into thickness for the

spindles. So this is a surface that used to be deep into the board right here but

now it's exposed. That's the sort of surface that I want to examine with the

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

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

within that seven to nine percent safety range. Now I didn't see where this wood

was stored. It was picked up for me at a warehouse but I can tell for sure that

this wood was stored in a heated environment. You can have wood that's

stored in a sheltered but unheated environment for a hundred years and it's

never going to get drier than 12 to 14 percent. So the fact that we're down to

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

applies if you're installing wood flooring. It's not unusual for people to

come to grief with wood flooring. They put it down they don't realize how damp

it is and then it shrinks and they get all kinds of cracks between the boards

and there's really nothing you can do in that case. So the trick, see the moisture

level of the wood you're using and don't do anything significant with it until

you're in that seven to nine percent critical level