- [Caleb Voiceover] I want to
build a hand-tool workbench
later this year, so I've been keeping
my eye out for some good lumber.
A few weeks ago, someone in my
area was having trees removed
from their yard and was kind enough
to let me harvest some
of the red oak left
behind by the tree service company.
The problem is, this needs
to dry before I can use it.
I built four of these raised
garden beds last year,
and thought one of them could
be reworked into a solar kiln.
I picked this one because it
faces south towards the sun.
Now my priorities with
making the solar kiln
are economy and efficiency
over performance.
I am not trying to build
anything professional quality,
I just want something
that's gonna be quicker
than air-drying and also inexpensive.
That said, I'll probably
make some improvements
on this over time
because I have other wood
that I'd like to dry and I
like to pick up found-wood.
At the end of the video, I'll talk
about some of the things that I can do
to make this more effective
later if I choose to.
I started with digging
out a lot of the dirt
so that I would have a
recess to place my lumber,
and then I raked up the sides because
I'm using the dirt here as an insulator
to help hold in the heat, and then I laid
down some old cardboard just to make sure
if there's any seeds left in here
it doesn't sprout through
and tear up my plastic.
I'm laying down heavy-duty plastic here.
This is three-mil and I have
it folded over four times
so the piece would fit, so it's
effectively 12-mil plastic,
and it serves two purposes.
First is to keep the
lumber out of the dirt
and also as a moisture barrier
to make sure that moisture
doesn't come out of the ground
so that way the area can
dry more effectively.
And I just staple this into place.
I chose black plastic over clear
because black helps hold the heat.
To keep my drying stock off the ground,
I just cut up some two-by-four
and I threw them down.
Now you can normally get away with using
much smaller stickers,
down to three-quarter
by three-quarter or even one inch.
I just used these because they were easy,
and since what I'm trying
to dry is very thick
and pretty heavy, these
are about eight-by-eight
to eight-by-ten, I figured
having larger stickers
wouldn't be a problem.
For the roofing material I chose
to use this clear corrugated plastic,
which will keep the rain
off, but also let the sun in.
Now it comes in 12-foot lengths,
and I don't have a truck or trailer,
so I just cut it to
size in the parking lot
so I could fit it in my car.
Good tip, if you need
an extra set of hands,
lots of times a clamp will do.
I'm just nailing in this board
to act as a roof support for
the polycarbonate roofing,
and these nails I'm not driving
in all the way, I left 'em
out about an 1/8 of an inch
so I can easily pull
'em out when it's time
to take this apart.
I wasn't sure how to
do my roofing material,
so I got to this point,
and then I just stopped,
took a minute, and thought about it
to figure out how I needed to proceed.
What I ended up doing was marking out
where the vertical and angled support is
and then cutting those out and notching it
so that way I could fit
my polycarbonate material
underneath it to make sure
rain couldn't get inside
of where I'm trying to dry the wood.
This took a little bit of back and forth,
but eventually I was able to
get a fit I was happy with.
And then when I do the other end,
I just do the exact same thing.
This side is close to the ground,
so to make sure rain doesn't get in,
I use some plastic
material to cover it up,
and then I also use the roofing material
as a guide to see where
I needed to put it.
Now whenever we do anything like this,
you always want to make sure that your
top material overlaps your bottom material
so that way, as water runs down it,
it doesn't run inside and
all stays on the outside.
To attach the polycarbonate
to the roof support,
I drilled a hole in the plastic
and then drove nails through.
These nails come from a manufacturer
and they have plastic washers on 'em
to make sure rain can't get in
through the hole that you drill.
The hole needs to be slightly oversized
to allow for movement as the
plastic doesn't have any give,
which is also why you
want to drill the hole
because trying to drive a nail through
it would crack and split it.
I chose to use 12-inch plastic
and use three layers overlapping
to close up the back.
I went with the overlapping method
instead of having a wide single sheet
because that'll help moisture
vent out of the kiln.
If I decide I want to keep
drying lumber after these,
one of the first improvements
I'll probably make
to the kiln will be
replacing all this plastic
with actual walls.
I went with plastic this time just
because it was less expensive and I wanted
to keep the budget on this project low,
and to see how well a very
improvised kiln would work.
So replacing this with foam board
or actual insulated walls would
probably work a lot better
because it would hold the heat better.
Along that line too would be doubling
up the roofing by adding
some spacing blocks
and then another layer of polycarbonate.
After that the next thing
that it would really need
to step up the game would be adding a fan
to increase air circulation
inside of the kiln.
So with the greater insulation
and then improving air circulation,
we'd pretty much have a small,
professional-grade kiln,
and I may make those upgrades.
If you have any experience
with drying wood in a kiln,
please feel free to leave me a comment
and let me know, I'm happy to learn more
about a good way to make this work.
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