Drying wood before starting your woodworking project is important if you don’t want your finished product to twist, crack, or warp upon delivery. Unfortunately, wood drying using natural method takes time.
Take air-drying for example. This natural method usually takes at least a year to dry wood per inch of thickness, and you don’t have much time to wait that long.
Luckily, there’s a quick way to dry your materials out if you’re only working on small pieces of wood. This is through the use of a microwave oven.
In this article, you will learn how to dry wood in an oven in five easy steps.
5 Steps to Dry Wood in Microwave Oven
Yes, it is possible to dry any type of wood in a microwave oven. You can do this as long as the wood is small enough to fit.
What You’ll Need:
* Microwave oven
* Postal scale
* Moisture meter
* Paper towels
* Oven mitts
Step #1: Measure the weight of the wood
Using a postal scale, weigh your wood samples to determine how much moisture you need to lose. Place your wood onto the postal scale and measure it in grams.
For best result, opt for scales with 0.1% accuracy.
Step #2: Determine the moisture content
Using a moisture meter, measure the moisture content of each piece of wood. Take note of the moisture content, which will be a percentage between 0 and 100. This will be used later to calculate the moisture content after the final heating.
Step #3: Start the heating process
Set the microwave oven on its lowest setting. This can either be “Low” or “Defrost” in your microwave oven settings. Place three to five paper towels underneath the wood to absorb the moisture it would give off. Heat the wood for 45 to 60 seconds.
In this stage, you need to lose about 15% to 25% of moisture content for each piece of wood.
Important note: You may place more than one piece of wood in the microwave. However, never let pieces of wood touch each other as touching pieces may ignite.
Step #4: Weigh the wood after the first round of heating
Remove the wood from the oven with your mitts. Then, measure and record the weight of the wood after the first round of heating. The drop in weight means moisture is leaving.
Step #5: Proceed to the next rounds of heating
Continue heating the wood until the moisture content is stable. For the following rounds, heat the pieces of wood for 45 to 60 seconds. Have a one-minute rest between each round.
Do this until you reach the goal: no more weight changes in the wood after heating. If you aren’t detecting a variation of more done 0.1 gram anymore using a highly accurate scale, then you have reached your goal.
With five easy steps, you can dry out small pieces of wood fast using a microwave oven. No need to wait for a long time to start your woodworking project.
Now that you learned how to dry wood in an oven, you can already work on your next wooden craft without risking your finished product to twist, crack, or warp.
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