<br>
<br>
<FONT face="Comic Sans MS, sans-serif" size=3>Hey Jim<br>
Seriously. wanna make me one?Too busy to gear up & besides you already conquered the learning curve. Some one could make money selling these contraptions. Could be you.<br>
Thanks<br>
Dale<br>
</FONT><br>
<div id=AOLMsgPart_0_1690fa35-1de2-4bed-8858-909f6afb4ae7 style="FONT-SIZE: 12px; MARGIN: 0px; COLOR: #000; FONT-FAMILY: Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, Sans-Serif; BACKGROUND-COLOR: #fff"><PRE style="FONT-SIZE: 9pt"><TT>Coming to this thread a bit late, with a couple comments and questions.
Gene, I went 'round robin hood's barn on this accurate, trustworthy mc readings
question. You might check
archives January '08 under "moisture meters?" for more of the discussion.
As a result of that thread, I ended up building a version of Ron's
direct reading dial indicator gizmo...and I love it!
A couple of points I learned as I worked this through:
1-Many of us were complaining about the inconsistent and generally weird results
achieved by oven drying. That's because oven drying is defined as between
215-217 deg f....a pretty narrow window. Before I calibrated Ron's gizmo, I
experimented with trying to get consistent results in the oven. The answer was
to be fairly anal about the oven temp.
My oven's thermostat is out to lunch, so, not having a lab oven, and being
generally cheap, I calibrated the oven by:
-first taking a plumbers water testing thermometer's probe and placing it in
boiling water, marking where boiling 212 was on the dial.
-then took a very small glass vial, like a dropper bottle, filled it with
vegetable oil, put the plumbers thermometer in it and put it in the oven. When
plumbers thermometer read just a hair over 212 in the oven
marked the oven dial and waited for the temp to be stable. For me this got
things close enough for jazz .
2- Hoadleys expansion/contraction/mc change formulas imply that wood's expansion
rate is linear. Expansion rates are in fact not quite linear! That means the
meter is best calibrated and
read at or reasonably near the mc you are shooting for. That's really not a
problem, because we only really care when the board has achieved that target
6.5% or whatever your shooting for.
3-Hey Jude, the gizmo saves having to invest in highly accurate hygrometers
(yeah, right) for your hot box. I've been burned enough times by fancy expensive
measurement devices to return to my pre-industrial roots...just stick Ron's
gizmo in with board and read the dial indicator.
A question for Ron...in your tall skinny hotbox, what is your heat source and
where is it located in the box. My box is similarly shaped, but I don't like
putting the heat source at the obvious place, ie the bottom, right up close to
the bottom of the board.
--
Jim Ialeggio
<A href="http://www.grandpianosolutions.com/" target=_blank>www.grandpianosolutions.com</A>
Shirley, MA (978) 425-9026
</TT></PRE></div>
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