Have you ever wondered how important the moisture content of the wood you’re using really is? We always hear about how wood movement and changes in the seasons can affect our projects. What really happens though? In an effort to demonstrate wood movement in an extreme case, I partnered up with Wagner Meters to try to show you why you need to know the moisture content of your lumber. Wagner Meters makes a whole line of moisture meters for woodworkers and other industries. For this project I’m using their Orion 950 moisture meter. If you’d like to check out their different moisture meters, there are links below.

For this project, I used a log right off the sawmill. This had no time to dry out. It’s really green and wet. I glued it into a tabletop and then glued and screwed on some breadboard ends. Now I know this isn’t how you would attach breadboard ends. Since breadboard ends go against the grain of the table top you need to allow some way for the tabletop to expand and contract. The reason for attaching them solidly for this project, is to lock up all the wood movement. We want to really see whats going to happen. Since we’re using really wet wood and giving it no room to move, we should see something give over time. And that’s what we did.

After completing the tabletop, I set up a time lapse for 6 months. Over the course of the time lapse, the wood began drying out and the tabletop began splitting. It started out as a small crack down the center, then it kept opening up as the days went by. At the end, the crack was large enough to fit my finger into and the breadboard ends had overhangs of up to 1/4″. If this was actually your Dining Table, it would be a disaster.

At the beginning of the project, the boards maxed out the moisture limits of the Orion 950 moisture meter. It measured over 32% moisture. By the end of 6 months, it had dried out to around 7% moisture content. 7% is a perfectly acceptable moisture content for building with. There was a ton of shrinkage in the wood and was super fun to watch the changes as time went on.

You can check out the whole build video below, including the time lapse. One note on the time lapse though. I set up the table near a window to help provide better light during the day. Since this time lapse ran 24/7 for 6 months that also includes overnight. As the video runs through daylight and dark, it became somewhat of a strobe light effect as I sped it up. If you are sensitive to strobe lights in any way, please use caution when viewing the time lapse.

This was a super fun project to do. I want to give a huge Thank You to Wagner Meters for allowing me to do this project with them.

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