The new best of the best moisture meters from Wagner actually have whole bevy of additional features as well. It does this by sending frequencies into the wood to get the MC, so it leaves absolutely no marks. Which will tell you the MC of a piece of wood up to 3/4” down inside the wood. The alternative to a pin meter is a pinless meter. And second, they put little holes in your piece. First, they only tell the MC of the outer 1/16th of an inch of your slab. The problem with these is pretty self evident. Which tell the MC by inserting two sharp pins into your wood about 1/16th of an inch. You can buy a cheap one on amazon for around $25. When is comes to moisture meters, they are not all created equally. Those eastern Oregon slabs have now been drying for six years and still have areas of moisture of over 30%. Turns out that rule can be true, but more often that not, it isn’t a good rule to follow. I even bought some air dried slabs from a very dry part of Eastern Oregon. Meaning, if you had a two inch thick slab, you could set it out of the elements and it would air dry in two years. I used to follow the old rule of “one inch per year” to air dry. So how do you know if a slab is dry? There is really only one good answer, and that is to use a moisture meter (more on these below). A slab sitting for a year or two might still have a MC of 30% or more. For comparison, a fresh cut walnut tree might have moisture content (MC) of 60%. EMC varies by region, Oregon is around 9%, Arizona is around 6%, and a humid area like Florida is around 12%. Meaning, all wood will have some moisture left in it. Either through air drying or kiln drying. All that EMC means is the percentage of water left in a piece of wood when it reaches equilibrium. A more accurate term would be “has it reached equilibrium moisture content (EMC)?” However you should know, nobody says that, and “dry” is still the expression we have. Dry is actually not the most accurate term. The definition of dry wood varies by the part of your country you are in. The wood will warp and twist as it dries, so you need the wood to be at equilibrium before you start working on it. The most important thing to know is, is it dry? You DO NOT want to work with wet wood. Before you start shopping for wood, you need to know a couple things first.
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