Should wood be wet before Carving?

Wet wood is wood that still holds the water it grew with, and it is the wrong wood to carve. I work dry, and I have for more than forty years. Wet fibers feel soft under the gouge, then they shrink as they dry, and the carving you finished on Friday splits open by spring.

So, should wood be wet before carving? Dry, every time, and I think I know why you are asking. You pushed a gouge into a dry board, it fought you, and somebody in a video told you to wet the surface so it goes easier. It does go easier. The trap sits right there, and it costs you the panel six months later.

Four things in the next few minutes. What water actually does inside a board, how long you have to wait, what I buy and where I buy it, and the one thing I do to a thick block so it never cracks on me.

The short of it, if you are standing in front of a board right now.

• Carve dry, because water makes the first pass easy and the next six months expensive.

• Air dried beats kiln dried in a carving shop.

• One year per inch of thickness is the wait, and a thirty dollar moisture meter ends the guessing.

• Quarter sawn boards stay flat, plain sawn stock bows and twists.

• Glue a thick block up with the growth rings alternating, then hollow it out so no fiber is left pulling.

• Basswood at 410 Janka holds fine detail, walnut at 1010 wants sharper steel.

• Steaming bends chair parts, it never carves ornament.

Dry, flat, quiet. This board will still be flat when the carving is done.

What happens to wood when it gets wet?

It swells, and when it dries again it shrinks back unevenly, which is what tears a carving apart. I said this on a livestream in April 2020 and I will say it the same way here, because it is the whole answer. Wood is just like a sponge. It takes water.

If there is moisture in the air, it gets that water in, and once it takes the water in, it expands. It puffs out.

Then the season turns. Really humid summertime, a lot of rain, it is going to puff, and you cannot prevent that. Dry wintertime, it shrinks down. A board is breathing all the time, and shrinkage across the grain is always bigger than shrinkage along it. That difference is the crack.

Where the board came from in the log decides how hard it fights you. Closer to the center, the less movement is going to happen, and out toward the bark a lot more. Measured wood science, not shop lore, and the USDA Forest Service Wood Handbook has the shrinkage numbers species by species if you want them. The Forest Products Laboratory has been measuring this since 1910, and the tangential and radial shrinkage figures are worth a look before you buy a thick board.

Block and paper. Nothing has been decided yet, and the wood is already the boss.

Blanks waiting. Some of these have been sitting in my shop for years.

Is wet wood easier to carve?

Yes, and that is exactly why it fools people. Water swells the fibers and makes them limp, so the gouge sinks in with less push from your shoulder. You feel strong. The thing under your gouge is a sponge.

Watch what it costs you. Soft wet fibers do not shear off cleanly, they mash and fold under the edge, and the surface comes up woolly instead of shining. A crisp arris on an acanthus lobe needs fibers that break where the edge tells them to break. Wet ones bend away and spring back.

Then it dries in your hands over the following weeks and every crisp thing you made moves.

That curl is what dry wood does for you. The wet stuff gives you fuzz.

Does wet wood ruin carving tools?

It rusts them, and a rusted edge is a dull edge within a day. Carbon steel gouges are what most of us use, and water sitting in the flute or under the ferrule pits the steel. I have a shelf of several hundred gouges behind my bench and not one of them meets wet wood.

There is a second cost people miss. Wet fibers pack into the flute of the gouge like clay and stop the shaving from clearing, so you push harder, and pushing harder is how you slip. Sharpening is the skill that takes years to get right, and it is the one I teach hardest in the tool sharpening course. Ruining an edge on wet stock to save a little effort is a bad trade.

The slicing cut. I rotate through the pass so the edge shears instead of shoving.

How long should wood dry before you carve it?

About one year per inch of thickness for air drying, so a two inch block is a two year wait. Old rule, and it holds up. What you are waiting for is equilibrium moisture content, the point where the board stops arguing with the air in your shop.

Some of my boards I keep in my shop for over 10 years, and a few I have had 20, or 24, 25 years. I have French limewood, rift cut, and you can still see all the flames in it. Tiger limewood, I call it, because it was sawn the right way.

You do not have to wait a quarter century. But stop believing that a log you dragged home in March is furniture in April. If you already have green stock and want the honest options, I wrote them out in drying green wood at home, in how long drying really takes, and in how long to cure wood for carving.

A cheap pin-type moisture meter costs about thirty dollars and settles the argument in four seconds. Buy one before you buy another gouge.

Carbon paper onto a board I trust. On a board still drying this tracing would not fit by next month.

Which is better for carving, kiln dried or air dried wood?

Air drying wins, and it has always been my preference. There are two drying methods. Kiln dry is what lumber yards use. They have a big, big, big stove, to be simple, and they fry it. Those boards get really fried. You can dry it quickly and sell it.

The other way just takes time, and the wood dries on its own, in the air, at its own pace. The part that matters for your hands is this. When you cut the tree, those fibers are still alive, and they suck water much quicker. The longer ago that tree was harvested, the more the fibers dry out and stop taking that water. They are not fresh any more, so they do not drink as much.

So an old air dried board is calmer in your shop than a fresh kiln dried one, even when a meter reads the same number on both. Honest problem, though. Stabilized wood, air dry, is really kind of hard to find nowadays. Most of the time when you are buying wood it is kiln dried, and all that puffiness is creating the problem. I still buy kiln dried when that is what exists, and I let it sit in the shop before a pencil touches it.

Stacked with air between them. Air drying is nothing more complicated than leaving a stack alone for a year or two.

How do I stop a carving from cracking?

Buy quarter sawn stock, glue thick blocks up with the rings alternating, and take out enough wood that the panel has nothing left to pull against. Those three things have kept my work together for years, and none of them involve water.

Step 1, buy the right cut of board

There are four ways to slice a log. Plain sawn gives you rings that crown across the face, and yes, you will get plenty of experience with movement. It warps, it bows, it twists. Quarter sawn is the best of the best, because the rings run edge to edge and the board mostly moves in thickness where nobody sees it. Rift cut is fine too. My own buying rule is rift cut, and better yet quarter sawn.

Paper between the blank and the board. It peels off later.

Step 2, glue up thick work with the grain alternating

My big pieces are not solid chunks. One panel I carved is six inches thick at its highest point and about 25 inches across, and it is three layers of two inch stock glued together. Glue two boards with the rings running the same direction and it moves worse. So you alter the direction of the grain, board by board, and you are creating a wave. Then you stagger the glue lines like brick laying so no joint sits at an opening.

Spread it, then wiggle the block until it sucks down. Water has nowhere to sit.

Glue lines you can find if you look. That block has not moved.

Step 3, excavate, and let the carving itself hold the panel still

Nobody tells you this one. When I do deep excavations I am breaking those fibers, and that already prevents cracking and the expansion and contraction, because it is not a solid board any more. There is no strength left inside those fibers, so nothing is going to pull on me. Between two ridges there is a cavity, so if that area expands or shrinks a little it has somewhere to go.

Every hollow like this one takes tension out of the block for good.

Which leads to something that complicates my own argument, and I would rather tell you than hide it. Somebody asked whether I am afraid of movement on a huge thick piece. Short answer, no. I am not, not at all. Even if it moves a little bit, it is okay. It still puffs, it still shrinks, and I have not had a problem in years. Dry wood is not wood that stopped moving. It is wood that moves so little, so slowly, that your carving survives it.

Deep excavation on a hazelnut block. Every hollow is one less fiber pulling.

Grain direction does the rest of the work, and I go through it properly in handling different grain directions.

Working from the outside edge toward the middle keeps the panel from splitting.

What wood should you actually carve?

Limewood first, which Americans sell as basswood, and walnut second. Andrew asked me once what my favorite carving wood is, and there are two. Limewood, or lipa as we call it in Russia. Number one, no argument. After that comes walnut, which I really, really love.

American basswood is the same genus as European lime, it is pale, it is even, and it holds a fine arris without arguing. The Wood Database entry for basswood puts it at 410 on the Janka scale, which is soft enough for detail and firm enough to hold an edge on a lobe. Black walnut sits at 1010 and asks more of your sharpening.

Forty years of this and I still keep the glue within reach of the plane.

Sourcing is not a small detail, and this is where I get particular. I use South Carolina and North Carolina basswood, and I almost never see gray streaks in it. Washington State lumber is fine for other species, but for limewood there is so much rain there that the water always gets inside and the roots pull coloration out of the earth, so you get gray lines running through the board. I like the Canadian side too. More forest, less pollution, good quality lumber.

Two glue blocks can come off the same species from different states and one will be pinkish and the other yellowish. Same tree family, different ground.

Titebond II here, because Titebond III leaves a black line you then have to carve through.

Whatever you do, keep away from construction lumber. Carve a 2x4 and you are going to get so frustrated and kill your tools. If you want the long version, read the basswood guide and whether walnut suits carving.

Do professional carvers ever carve green wood?

Some do, and they are doing a different job than I am. Green woodworkers split chairs and bowls from green stock on purpose, because a turned bowl is allowed to go oval and a chair rung is supposed to shrink tight around a wet tenon. Good craft, and it puts movement to work.

Half carved, half still drawn. Both halves have to agree about their size for weeks.

Architectural ornament cannot do that. A capital has to still fit its column in ten years, and a replacement apron has to match an antique that already finished moving. When I carve for a client the piece has to sit on a wall and behave, so I take the water out first and the movement with it.

Grinling Gibbons carved his limewood the same way three hundred years ago and his work is still hanging in England. David Esterly, who spent a year replacing a Gibbons carving lost in a fire at Hampton Court, put the wood's character better than I can in his book The Lost Carving:

limewood is a patrician medium that, treated correctly, really will be an obedient servant.

Treated correctly. That is the whole hinge of it.

Here is the livestream where I drew the log cuts on a board and explained all of this with a marker in my hand. Watch from nine minutes.

What about soaking, steaming or oiling the wood first?

Steaming and soaking belong to bending wood, and oil belongs after the carving, not before it. Boiling water softens lignin so a chair maker can bend a back slat around a form. It does nothing good for an acanthus leaf.

You get raised grain, a fuzzy surface, and a board that dries at a different rate than the wood beside it, which is a small warp waiting to happen.

Oil is a different question and a fair one. A light coat before abrasive work can hold loose fibers down, and I do use a sanding sealer that way. Oiling to make dry wood carve like wet wood is not what oil does. I answered both of these properly in softening wood before carving, what boiling water does to wood, and oiling before you carve.

Fighting the material looks like this. Torn fibers, crumbled petals, no shadow.

An aside, since we are talking about wood that fights back. Years ago a demolition company on the East Coast asked me to carve an office table out of heart pine they had harvested from 19th century factory posts. About twelve feet long. Heart pine from the middle of a big tree barely moves, which is why those factories stood, and it is also hard as a rock. Almost impossible to drive a nail into. I broke a lot of gouges on that table.

Should beginners carve wet wood?

No, and a beginner has more to lose from it than I do. You are still learning what a clean pass feels like. If the wood is mushy, every pass feels the same, and you never build the hand that tells sharp from dull or with the grain from against it.

Start with a dry basswood board about two inches thick, quarter sawn if you can get it. Put your drawing on it. Carve it. Let the wood be the one thing in the room that is not a variable, so the only things left to fix are your drawing and your edge. The beginner course starts exactly there, which is why we begin with a cutting board instead of a sculpture.

Then, when your hands know what dry basswood feels like under a sharp #7, go read about whether thicker stock is better and how to stabilize thin work.

A panel that has settled. The drawing on the right will still line up tomorrow.

You have a piece of wood in your shop right now and a question about it. Do you want to keep guessing which boards will betray you, or do you want somebody to show you how to read a board before you draw on it?

It starts on paper. The wood only has to be quiet enough to receive it.

Over 3,000 lessons, filmed at this bench. I put the design lessons before the carving ones for exactly the reason this whole article circles back to. The material decides what your drawing is allowed to do. Your tuition also sends money to orphans and widows, because that is how this school was built.

Shall we carve?