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Started by OH logger, November 01, 2012, 10:32:06 PM

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OH logger

what is the best species of wood to use for stickers? hardwood or softwood? green or dry?
thanks :-\
john

WDH

Must be dry.  That is critical.  Otherwise, wet or green stickers can lead to sticker stain on your lumber, and that is not good, especially for furniture grade hardwood.  Species does not matter that much.
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OH logger

thanks for the reply! what are the basic dimensions of them?
thanks
john

WDH

Minimum 3/4" thick.  Maximum 1 1/2" wide.  I personally like a 1" by 1" sticker.
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Ianab

I just use 1 x 1, usually just edgings from whatever I'm sawing, but 3/4" planed wood is OK too. You want something reasonable quality, or the small size means they break at knots.

Some species you can get away with using green stockers, cedar and cypress for example, but others will stain for sure. Doesn't matter for construction grade material, but if appearance matters, make sure the stickers are dry. The staining can "shadow" quite a way into the board, so it won't always plane off.

Ian
Weekend warrior, Peterson JP test pilot, Dolmar 7900 and Stihl MS310 saws and  the usual collection of power tools :)

hackberry jake

I have access to bundles of kiln dry stickers. They are the culls from a commercial dry kiln. Mostly red oak I believe. I think I am just going to start cutting my own though. They are from 2' to 9' long and usually either crooked or thin. They are however awesome kindling  8).
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WoodenHead

At this time of year, dry, Eastern White Cedar works best for me.

Everyone will probably laugh, but my first few hundred stickers came from Home Depot.   ;D  I didn't have any dry wood to cut my own, so I bought a number of 14' SPF, 2 x 6 (supposedly kiln dried).  Finished dimensions are 5.5" x 1.5" so I sliced them into 1 x 1.5" stickers (3 to a 14' length).  It took me a while to sift through Home Depot's pile to find some reasonably straight lumber.  ::)

Now I cut stickers from dried boards (usually white pine or cedar) or use edgings.

Dan_Shade

my first stickers were furring strips
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There's a fine line between turning firewood into beautiful things and beautiful things into firewood.

tcsmpsi

I use SYP stickers, mostly from the slab area of the log that that is non-resinous, with a bug hole or two.  I like mine 1  1/4"X1 1/4".
\\\"In the end, it is a moral question as to whether man applies what he has learned or not.\\\" - C. Jung

davch00

My first ones came from Lowe's. I usually just cut some out of edgings now but cottonwood and willow has recently become my favorite. 

Ohio_Bill

IMO  If you are  sticking framing lumber or low grade, green stickers from what you are sawing are just fine. If you are sticking grade lumber I would use dry stickers made from whatever hardwood you have available.
Bill
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haywire woodlot

I normally just use green stickers when I cut fir or cedar, but yesterday, I fell and milled a western maple to make butcher block table for my wife. For this purpose I sacrificed an ugly old 6x6, to make dunage and stickers so not to stain the white clean maple. I'm of to drop it at the kiln now.
Dave

terrifictimbersllc

Dry, light colored wood.  3/4 to 1" thick if you are sawing them. I always recommend 8' 1x3's from Home Depot to customers, they're dry, light colored, and have only tiny knots.  I saw them down the center and cut them in half,  so the stickers are 3/4 x 1-1/4 x 48".   4 per 8' 1x3 for about 25 cents each.
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GeneWengert-WoodDoc

Any species can be used, but the stronger species (like oak) will last longer.  As mentioned, commercial operations that stack 6' wide piles often have broken sticks that can be used for 4' and 5' piles and the price is good.

Almost all stickers are 3/4" thick.  Thinner sticks will result in poor air flow.  Thicker sticks will result in better air drying (but if air drying is done a few weeks earlier will you move the pile to the kiln early?  If not, then faster air drying is not a benefit.  Air dried wood that gets rained on can actually develop more defects.)  Thicker stickers will cut kiln capacity (but some kilns are under-powered, so less lumber means that the kiln works better.  If a sticker were 3/4 x 1, sometimes the sticker would get oriented wrong, adding to lumber warp.  So, stickers are either square (3/4 x 3/4 is really quite weak) or else the width is wide enough that the correct orientation is obvious--1-1/4 to 1-1/2" widths are common.

For any wood that will be an appearance wood, staining is a defect.  Therefore, stickers must be dry.

Stickers with a groove down the length on the top and bottom allow for air flow along the sticker and help reduce stain.  There are patented sticker designs where the grooves run at an angle.
Gene - Author of articles in Sawmill & Woodlot and books: Drying Hardwood Lumber; VA Tech Solar Kiln; Sawing Edging & Trimming Hardwood Lumber. And more

mikeb1079

i have enough home projects that i just keep all the short 2x scraps and throw em in a pile then resaw on bandsaw to around 3/4 by 1 1/2".  it's been working for me..... 8)
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drobertson

I am with Ianab, I cut strips when making boards and stack the good ones to the side, then cut to 42". Knots are a pain, 1-1/8 is what I use, and they dry pretty quick.
only have a few chain saws I'm not suppose to use, but will at times, one dog Dolly, pretty good dog, just not sure what for yet,  working on getting the gardening back in order, and kinda thinking on maybe a small bbq bizz,  thinking about it,

Tree Feller

I workeded at a sawmill one summer during high school and one of the jobs I was given was making stickers. They had a saw specifically for them. A board was fed into one side by an operator and it came out the other side, along with the sticker that was ripped off. The second operator removed the sticker with one hand while re-inserting the board with the othetr. A common practice was to whack the sticker on the concrete floor to make sure it wouldn't break before stacking it. I wasn't coordinated enough to be good at the job but the women working there made it look easy.

I cut my stickers 3/4 x 3/4, just because that's the dimension I started with when I didn't really know any better. I should probably go to 3/4 x 1 1/4 for the added strength and I could still use the ones I have now.

One thing I have learned...one can never have too many stickers.   ;)
Cody

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WDH

I have some of the commercial stickers that came from a large pine sawmill.  These were rejects that had been broken.  They are 3/4 x 1 1/4" and made from an Indonesian hardwood.  I use these for oak, red and white.  For pecan and maple, I use the 1" x 1" to get a little better air flow to help reduce gray stain.
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tcsmpsi

I like the 1 1/4" since I only air dry.  I cut mine from older pine from the outer area that is dryer and has usually a borer or two, or 97.  When it catches my eye, good and solid, yet a bit more porous, no knots, and they're my logs, I cut a few.  Borer hole here or there only helps airflow.   :D
\\\"In the end, it is a moral question as to whether man applies what he has learned or not.\\\" - C. Jung

wwsjr

I cut stickers 1"X1"X42". I stack 40" wide due to the length of my FEL forks. Most of mine are pine or cypress because that is the majority of wood I saw. After I run flitches on edger, I screw a block on edger guide (Minimum width on edger 3") then run all the edger strips back on edger, stack and cut to length with chainsaw. I "sticker" the stickers on a pallet to dry. Most of my stickers leave with the lumber and I never see them again. I place stickers on all wood as I take off mill, I never flat stack. Most of my regular customers return the stickers. I usually have a junk log around to cut 3"X3"X48" to use a blocking between stacks.
Retired US Army, Full Time Sawyer since 2001. 2013 LT40HD Super with 25HP 3 Phase, Command Control with Accuset2. ED26 WM Edger, Ford 3930 w/FEL, Prentice Log Loader. Stihl 311, 170 & Logrite Canthooks. WM Million BF Club Member.

5quarter

OHlogger...When I first started sawing, I used reclaimed framing lumber, mostly tight grained douglas fir. All mine are cut to 48"L x 1½"W. Like WDH, I use 1" thick stickers for pine and a few hardwoods and ¾" for everything else. I still use nearly all the DF stickers I cut years ago...they've held up pretty good. since then, I've cut stickers from almost anything you can imagine, but I think the white oak stickers are top shelf. once dry, they remain straight and flat regardless of how they're treated. The sad thing about stickers is that they should be cut from the best logs to give the best service. I always have an eye out for short (5-6') but clear oak logs for just that purpose. Also, in an effort to maintain exact uniformity, I plane all my stickers.
   Ditto what someone said about never having enough stickers... ;)
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redbeard

I built a sticker shack to keep my sizes in order I like 7/8 x 7/8 x 42" . Saves on your shins n ankles getting scraped when you walk by your stickered lumber piles.   

 
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red oaks lumber

the 2 most important things with stickers
1) have all stickers the same thickness,  not close but the same thickness
2) sticker your lumber very careful. keep each row going straight up on top of your bottom  support.
i'll use any material for stickers with the exception of pine. all my sticks are planed 3/4 thick by 1 1/4 wide 42'' long with no bark!
yes you can have to many stickers :D  now with the shift in the economy i dont have as much wood on sticks, i have approx. enough for 80,000 b.f. so i'm culling very hard only keeping the very best. 


the experts think i do things wrong
over 18 million b.f. processed and 7341 happy customers i disagree

trapper

I store my stickers verticaly in barrels.
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Al_Smith

I went around to a couple of lumber yards and got a bunch of dunnage boards and ripped them on the table saw.They are an item they have no use for, freebies

Lawdy I had about a  half a pick up load and when I got the job done a couple of barrels full of stickers and a couple wheelbarrows full of saw dust .They were 3/4" by 3/4" most 4 feet long .

pineywoods

Neighbor sawyer (LeroyC on here) got an order for 12,000 5 ft 1X1 stickers, to be picked up in less than week. Lucky he had a bunch of bug-killed pine logs. Using his mill and mine from daybreak till dark , we delivered. If you need a bunch of stickers in a hurry, we can show you how to do it. Ever see a semi load of stickers ?

 

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Woodey

I use 1" X 1" SYP stickers 48" long. They work great for all types of wood and don't leave sticker stain when they are dry.

I like your sticker shed redbeard. I've been wanting to build some type of storage for my extra sticker. Last week I went to get some stickers off a pallet out by the kiln. The ants built a big mound under the pallet and though the stickers.
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drobertson

I use oak and pine stickers, 1- 1/8 sq. 42" long.  I do like the idea of putting them in barrels, however, I do like to keep weight on them to keep them flat while drying.  I have drying racks  I store mine in held by four sides, and let the weight of the stickers to maintain the weight.  some will bow and curl, I use these for short term uses.  From what I have seen from a few local kilns, their stickers are used and abused, and the allowable amount left for planing covers any variation caused by stickers or normal stress that occurs during the drying process.  Again, I am just a has been tool maker that love the smell of sawdust. 
only have a few chain saws I'm not suppose to use, but will at times, one dog Dolly, pretty good dog, just not sure what for yet,  working on getting the gardening back in order, and kinda thinking on maybe a small bbq bizz,  thinking about it,

Dustin

How long would it take to air dry 1 inch pine stickers before you would use them?
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OH logger

thanks for all the ideas folks. i think there are as many ideas for stickers and sticker making as there are sawmills. any way this helps out a lot thank you
john

drobertson

Dustin, sorry I don't have a good answer for you on this.  I have three racks that I use, and try to keep them in order of how I cut them, as to their moisture content.  I try to keep them from laying completely flat against one another but they do at times lay flat, I have not ran anything through a kiln with mine, so I could be speaking way out of turn. This being said,  after a few years of dealing with them, one can tell from their weight as to how dry they are.  After all, looking at how flooring mills around here stack their lumber for air drying outside, I can only presume that there has to be some absorbtion of humidity into the stickers.  It would be nice if some folks commented on just how much sticker stain really affects the finish product after planing,  I never heard how deep this stain goes into the boards.
only have a few chain saws I'm not suppose to use, but will at times, one dog Dolly, pretty good dog, just not sure what for yet,  working on getting the gardening back in order, and kinda thinking on maybe a small bbq bizz,  thinking about it,

Jim_Rogers

Quote from: Dustin on November 05, 2012, 04:24:07 PM
How long would it take to air dry 1 inch pine stickers before you would use them?

I think that all depends on the time of year that they are cut. It could be as low as 90 days or as high as 120 or more depending on lots of variables.

I stack my stickers on pallets or someone may call them skids as there is no board across the bottom. Just a deck with two legs to hold up the deck for the fork lift to get under. Some of the most recent pallets I've made have three legs.

Here is a drawing of my pallet of stickers:



And the pallet/skid only:



When we started with the sawmill we only had some logs and the sawmill. We had to make everything else we needed.
So we made blocks to stack the lumber on and we made stickers to put between the rows.

I think we read in the "kiln dryers handbook" that the stickers should be of hardwood and I don't know if it said the sizes that should be used or not. But we decided on 1" thick and 1 1/2" wide and 4' long.
I think they recommend piles of lumber 4' wide. I know my forks are only 42" so we can't go much wider.

Anyway, we needed to have dry stickers. So we built a solar sticker dryer. I don't have a picture of it when it was new. And it's nearly gone now, and I don't want to show you the sad shape it's in.
But we made it just like you'd make a regular solar lumber dryer, only the length was very short. Just enough for the stickers and some space around them as required by the plans we got somewhere for a solar dryer.

We'd stack the oak stickers in there and let them go for about a month. I think we used the weight test to tell when they were dry. And we'd unload them and reload another batch the same day.
We had an indoor outdoor thermometer so we could see how hot it got inside. We hooked it up backwards so outside was inside. And it would get up to 110°F or more on a sunny day.

To keep track of the "dry" stickers we painted the ends with red paint from a spray can.
I stick all my regular lumber with red end stickers and any outgoing custom sawing lumber with regular air dried pine stickers.

I keep a pallet or two of air dried pine stickers for customer to use with their custom sawing lumber. And I don't give them away. I charge them for the stickers.

The air dried pine stickers I make from edgings are 1" thick and 2" wide x 4' long.

When I'm edging pine boards I usually drop 2" to clean up an edge from 10" to 8" and or from 8" down to 6" and such.
So I make sticker stock all the time I'm edging boards on the mill.

Back in 02 or so, I did a big custom sawing job for a local tree service where I sawed up 60 pine logs for a truck garage. The garage was 40' wide and 50' long and had a 16' ceiling.
While sawing up all the posts for this pole barn type structure, all the nailers and all the siding, I made a mountain of sticker edgings. I didn't take the time to cut them as I went along, I just tossed all the sticker edgings into a pile next to my slab saw table.

Then after the job was done I took a day or so and cut up all the stickers left over from that job. And I think I may have added some more to the pile as I remember it when I was done, I had 5 pallets of stickers.
I placed them in the back of my lumber yard and let them air dry.

This past summer I finally used up the last pallet from that job. I can't believe they lasted me 10 years, but they did.

I started saving a new stack of edging for a new pallet of stickers.

And I had to take a lift of 1x4x8 and cut it up to make a new pallet of dry stickers.

I rarely ever sell any 1x4's and I only stock them for making pallets and stickers.

I didn't get that many stickers from the lift I cut up because it was only a small part of a lift.

Well any way that's my sticker story.

I hope it has helped you, some.

Jim Rogers
Whatever you do, have fun doing it!
Woodmizer 1994 LT30HDG24 with 6' Bed Extension

Okrafarmer

"Well any way that's my sticker story."

And you're sticking to it.  ;)

At Hancock lumber in Maine, seems like we used birch stickers.

I ended up with some sticker stain on some of my pine lumber recently. Not sure why, I guess my stickers must have been green.
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