Laminating oregon

[Cut-Throat Jake]

Hello, I am presently planning on face-gluing 19mm x 45mm oregon strips for a sructural beam. I live in Australia, and the oregon we get from the States is not kiln dried. Would you recommend testing the water content of the timber before laminating using epoxy? I'm wondering how stable it might be.

Vaughan

[Thaddeus J. Van Gilder]

laminating Oregon? Isn't Oregon already laminated between California and Washington???

alright, that was bad...but it's early.

I would rip out the strips and let them air dry a while before you laminate them. this will at least dry the surface enugh to use epoxy...

-Thad

[Bruce Hooke]

FWIW - Over here it's called Douglas Fir...

If I remember correctly, the seat-of-the-pants test that Gougeon Bros. recommends is: sand the surface lightly -- if you get dust then it's dry enough to glue, if you don't get dust then it's too wet. If it were me, I would probably oven dry a sample and get the moisture content that way, just to be sure, but that's easy for me to say because I have a scale with the necessary precision to do this.

As an aside, it's not stability that I would be most worried about, but glue-ability. Standard epoxy does not work well with wet wood.

[Andreas Jordahl Rhude]

Don't know about epoxy, but if you are using resorcinol, the wood moisture content better be 16 percent or lower. Do the instructions on the container give you information?