Question
I am just starting out in the furniture making business. I have my first batch of furniture ready for export from my workshop in Indonesia to the UK.
We dried our oak in a custom-made kiln before fabrication, but I am very worried that whatever drying effects we might have produced in the kiln will be wiped out by the storage of our finished products in the tropical atmosphere!
I have read that some simple and cost effective precautions include heating the storage facility (same location as the workshop, so might get very hot for the people working there!) to ~10C above the morning low temp, and also insulating the finished products using thick plastic sheeting. I plan to do both of these things.
Are there any other simple and cost effective ways of ensuring that our finished products do not regain moisture from the air, while they are waiting for the container to arrive? We are going from a ~80% RH manufacture environment to a ~50% RH consumer environment. I see the risk associated with shrinkage due to water loss in my products to be the single biggest risk to my business at the moment. Can anybody advise what the maximum MC value I should except for shipping should be (considering that this is my very first batch, I am pretty desperate to get some positive cash flow at this point!). I'm thinking that MC greater than 12% will just be too risky to ship to the UK, with MC ideally at 9 or 10% to suit the UK's ~50% RH environment.
If the products do turn out to have MC greater than ~12%, and I decide that the risk of damage is too great, is there anything I can do with the finished products to get their MC back down (quickly!)? If I raised the storage temp by ~10C above morning low (equivalent to ~40% RH?), presumably the products would gradually reach equilibrium with that environment (~10% MC), but I guess that could take a long time? Could I dry the finished products in the kiln, on a low temp?
Forum Responses
(Furniture Making Forum)
12/17 #3: Storage & Drying in Tropical Env.
Steve
nowhares@hotmail.com
From contributor S:
Perhaps a dehumidifier set up in an old but airtight shipping container on site would work okay. Heat is already fairly good, as I recall from a holiday in Bali! From talking to exporters there, I think the biggest warping headaches come from teak, or whatever is used that is a low grade and badly dried timber. It is cheaper, but gives many problems. Some there are using recycled demolition teak, which is really stable. Please think of the orangutans before using wood from Sumatra. Java is all plantations, but their wood needs care.
What you say about poor quality timber and poor quality drying regimes seems to fit with what I'm hearing from my people there. And thanks for the storage container idea; that hadn't occurred to me before. I guess it would make a cheap and easy air-tight storage space, perfect for conditioning the air, as you say. Does anybody have advice on a safe maximum MC% that I should allow in pieces that I approve for export to the UK?
