Drying
After wood selection, the components must be dried either naturally or in drying rooms, as they must be dried to a humidity level that is ideal for our climate. Very often the drying chamber is required as the natural drying process takes too much time. If improperly dried wood, e.g. “wet” wood is processed into furniture, inevitably it will continue its drying procedure thereafter, especially during dry weather conditions, and inevitably excessive cracking, fissuring, shrinking and deformation of the individual components of furniture will result. To make no mistake, such phenomena cannot be excluded entirely, not even in the case of correctly processed wood, because we must not forget that the processed material is natural, organic, subdued to certain natural errors. For that reason such deficiencies should not be subject to claim reasons, on the condition that they affect neither the furniture utility, not the life expectancy of it.
As bad as insufficient dryness is excessive dryness of wood for exterior furniture, as such, in conditions of high humidity, may swell out. Fissures formation would be reduced, but wood swelling might deteriorate the joints, too.
The best situation is that the wood is dried to a certain degree through which both shrinking and swelling are reduced to the minimum. This is obtained by a medium dryness condition of the wood, which produces an equal percentage of shrinking and swelling under given extreme weather conditions.
Different from damages due to insufficient drying, there are sometimes visible “wind cracks” that are very normal: the appearance of some thin fissures on the so called frontal side of wood (transversal cut surface toward texture) in very dry climate conditions, which, as soon as humidity increases again, disappear. As humidity fluctuations in our climate are much higher than in the natural environment of teak wood (tropical climate), this represents a natural reaction of the wood to an unusual environment and is sometimes also called “breathing”. The reason for this phenomenon is that wood tends to evaporate moisture much quicker at the end of a section (close to the transversal cut) as it would be able to evaporate it from the core of the section. Thus at the ends it will loose volume much quicker, which creates tensions creating these small cracks, which immediately disappear when moisture returns to the section. |
