Solar Kiln

Looks good! Interested to hear the drying progress and outcome of your first run….

-- Just a small fish in a big pond trying to make a difference one job at a time.

looks good hope it works great.

-- W James Brokenbourgh Custom furniture maker http://artisticwoodstudio.com/

This makes complete sense! Let us know the results!!

-- Kelly, woodworker under construction

its a pretty simple design. i may need to research some more

-- There is nothing like the sound of a well tuned hand plane. - http://timetestedtools.wordpress.com (timetestedtools at hotmail dot c0m)

Excellent execution it seems. One idea would be to add a moisture measuring instrument so you can track the progress.

-- - Power is not revealed by striking hard or often, but by striking true. -

Looks a little different (not much) from mine but I know you are going to love it. You probably know this but from experience, I would suggest that you either fill it to it’s rated capacity or cover part of the collector area for smaller loads. These things are seriously powerful.

What part of BC are you from? I’m in Cowichan Bay.

-- Paul M ..............If God wanted us to have fiberglass boats he would have given us fiberglass trees. http://prmdesigns.com/

Vak, for now I am using a moisture meter to test the mc of the boards.
Right now I have the following MC
Pine – 15
Juniper – 12-18
Box elder – 33-35
I’ll post what it is in another month.

Shipwright, since you mentioned it I recalled reading about filling the kiln or covering part of it for smaller loads. How best is it to cover a half load? I’m just outside of Penticton.

Cheers

-- Carpe Diem

You may have read that in a post I made to another build like yours. I dried a less than capacity load of arbutus the first time and just had too much heat. I had some areas just collapse. There are of course lots of high tech ways to deal with this but the low tech way is to just cover part of the collector. It works great. For a half load, I’d cover half of the collector surface until you get rid of the inter cellular water (about 18%). After that you can’t do any harm.

I did most of my research on the Woodweb. There are some good articles that came if I’m not mistaken from the University of Oregon.

-- Paul M ..............If God wanted us to have fiberglass boats he would have given us fiberglass trees. http://prmdesigns.com/

Is there a fan in it anywhere? I looked into this once and heard they help.

-- Beer, Beer, Thank God for Beer. It's my way of keeping my mind fresh and clear...

My admittedly ghetto solar kiln: I used 4 sheets of 5/8” OSB painted black + a lot of 2×4s to create 12’x4’x4’ box, with open top and bottom, sitting on bricks above my concrete driveway. I made a roof from 6mil clear PE sheet. In about 2 months of a PA summer, I got about 400bf of white oak/cherry/hard maple cut only a few months earlier down to 9-11% which is what kiln dried wood seems to normalize to when stored in my basement shop (I measured by weighing samples with a very accurate scale before and after a long time in a well controlled electric oven)

Yep, there is a small solar fan in it. Denovich, your method and lots of others will work as well. I had to make mine look reasonable because the Mrs. would be on the warpath if it wasnt. I have always thought that in a pinch a black tarp wrapped around a large piece of wood would help to bake it in the sun. I’ve never tried it, but it might work. There’s lots of ideas out there.

I’m hoping to get mine down to 9% MC and thats all I need. For the stuff that has already been air drying for a year I don’t have far to go.

-- Carpe Diem

Peterrum,

Do you have some sort of cover over the wood to shield it from the sun? I used a roll of rosin paper to keep the sun from affecting the color of the boards. Cherry gets a tan in a real hurry.

I don’t have anything yet but i plan on getting that done tomorrow. Thanks for the advice.

-- Carpe Diem

I don’t have anything yet but i plan on getting that done tomorrow. Thanks for the advice.

-- Carpe Diem

Great idea! I have researched a lot of solar wax melters (I am a beekeeper as well as a woodworker) which look very similar to this, but my dumb mind never thought of using one for a kin… love it.

-- Tyler- Montandon, PA ------ "It aint broke, it just needs fixed!"