We send warm greetings to all of our customers and friends, who, at Teakland, are more often than not one and the same thing! There is a positive feeling here in Bulawayo following the good rains we received in February; we were on the edge of a bad drought before that, but luckily the rains rescued us. The crops are now much more promising, the grass and bush flourishing, the rivers flowing and the dams filling.
Our staff are in good spirits, the economy definitely seems to be picking up and our order book is healthy. Every day we receive new and interesting enquiries.
We thought in this blog to chat a bit about the drying of timber. The kiln drying of timber is an essential part of the carpentry process known as conversion. This is the converting of a felled log into useful timber ready for making end products. It starts with sawing the logs into planks and then kiln drying them. We usually purchase planks “wet off saw”, and then kiln dry them ourselves. It is an important process and is done in a simple kiln where the temperature and moisture content is controlled over a period of approximately a month, a bit of a labour of love!
The heat for our kilns is produced from our sawdust and small timber offcuts. This produces a smokey environment, excellent treatment against many borers and bugs which might otherwise find the wood quite palatable. It is a very environment friendly way of dealing with that issue.
We aim to get the moisture levels in the planks down to 12 percent which is an ideal and necessary foundation step for good carpentry.
