Kiln Drying

[DLH]

Would kiln drying be ok for staves? I thounght it would be quicker and could practice on more bows this way. I have some osage and black locust that I am planing on cutting sometime. Would this dry too quickly I think it would at least be a legitimate thing to try.

[Living_waters]

Done it with white woods, after they have dried a few weeks. But osage I have a real problem with, tried a couple times to put some duck call blanks in the hot box, they checked really bad.

[Don Stokes]

The denser wood is, the harder it is to dry artificially without causing major defects. In commercial kilns, heavy woods like oak may take a month in the kiln to dry without harm. Osage and locust are even more dense than oak, so they would have to be dried at low temperature with humidity in the air to slow the drying, for a long time. Weeks, at least. Commercial kiln operators use very complex schedules, adjusting the temperature and humidity several times in the process.

[DLH]

Just shooting an idea out there but would it be better to seal the ends with glue and put a thin coat of glue over the entire bow. I just don't want to wait a year for it to dry than end up breaking anyways being in college doesnt help any for lack of time to harvest trees and can't work on bows in my dorm either. So at the moment I do board bows but really want to make a bow from scratch by myself.

[Tom Leemans]

You can always rough out the stave and then dry it "faster". There's several postings on doing this. Do yourself a favor though and get a copy of "Hunting The Osage Bow" by Dean Torges. He'll take you from tree to hunting bow.