Schuetzenmiester wrote on Aug 26
th, 2018 at 11:37pm:
The finest woodworkers allow for seasonal changes due to humidity. The lack of issues is more likely due to the lack of exposure extremes. zIf it was preventable, the finest furniture would have been exempted centuries ago.
Actually, Nearly ALL of the professional wood workers I know of, some making musical instruments highly sensitive to changes in temp and humidity, refuse to seal the wood anywhere but on outer surfaces. This dooms them to take a number of well established methods to allow for expansion/shrinkage of unsealed wood. It also means users of wooden musical instruments have to do a lot of retuning, often after each tune.
We get to watch this incessant retuning of wooden string instruments every time our Swedish and Norwegian friends bring their violins and nyckleharpas to Colorado or we take ours to their countries. And, the sound boxes of these wooden string instruments are made of dense, fine grained wood that has very small growth rings.
However, some makers of stringed wooden musical instruments, people with engineering backgrounds, have gone to sealing the inside of the sound boxes of their wooden musical instruments with light-weight sealants whose solid state vibrational properties are a close match to those of the wood used in these sound boxes. Note that this DOES NOT alter the thermal expansion properties of these special woods.
Your assumption about furniture makers does not apply to anything where wood must remain stable in applications where stability is highly important, eg, sound boxes of stringed wooden musical instruments. Tradition has been the limiting factor, at least as regards effects of moisture on changes in vibrational properties of wood.
The extensive use of synthetic stocks on rifles would not have gained so much of its popularity IF everyone had properly and fully sealed ALL surfaces of their rifle stocks.
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Gun room humidity (Read 11882 times)
