Whew!

I was wondering!

I ended-up not getting in on this, but WOWSER, that sure looked like a long day for he & Rita...

Glad he was able to reassess & redress...

Rest Well, Mule Brother

That space between the top of her socks and the bottom of her pants legs is getting longer by the minute!

Well, that turned out to be a longer day than expected! I knew I was in for 6-7 hours of driving, but with bumper to bumper traffic from SeaTac all the way south of Olympia, we ended up being over an hour late getting to Mike's place and the drive turned into closer to 10 hours. Once there, the Balrog put us under her spell, the piles of wood grew larger and larger, then chow ensued. Much chocolate was had afterward which further slowed progress, but placated the balrog. Finally everything was wedged into place, strapped down tight, and we headed north, more than 1-1/2 hours behind schedule. Brian was super patient waiting for us to show up so late, but he finally got his walnut at Cabela's in Lacey. My eyes were already droopy, and even with Mike & his friend doing the lion's share of the loading, I was out of gas. Begged off meeting up with Jim until tomorrow morning, but we'll get all of your stuff unloaded then. Sorry we couldn't meet our schedule, but both Rita & I had a great time meeting Mike & his family, and look forward to the next time we can visit.

Thank you for all your effort muling the wood David! I'll see you tomorrow at Jim's place.

Thank you David! And thank you Mike! I'm sitting here staring at my wood with a smile on my face this morning.
Serious, what a great guy David and his wife are to meet in person.
THank you once again.

You're quite welcome and we appreciated the gracious offer of a place to stay the night. I guess the fatigue I was feeling must have been evident on my face. It was nearly 10pm when we got home, the poor hound thought his throat had been cut and wolfed down his dinner. I had a snort of bourbon and barely remember going to bed. Feeling a bit achy this morning, but looking forward to getting the stack unloaded at Jim's place in a few hours.

I think only 3 (maybe 4) of the slabs were fully green. Those were Douglas Fir live-edged on both sides.
The bookmatched Douglas Fir are over halfway through drying.
All the Cedar, Ash and Black Walnut are very dry, but if being used for interior furniture they could be "finished" by sanding them and placing them inside a conditioned part of your house for a week. The thicker slabs that are already air dried could use a week or 2 per inch to acclimatize to the dryness desired for interior furniture.

For the big live-edged Douglas Fir slabs, here are a couple of search ideas:
YouTube : DIY Slab Dehumidifier

There are several good videos and dozens of ok videos on building simple slab dehumidifier.

Foam panels:

Spoiler: show

https://youtu.be/cK3dIyVVm4M

Here's one without even an enclosure:

Spoiler: show

https://youtu.be/LT0EzTH-ryQ

Just google or search on YouTube University for some combination of DIY Slab dehumidifier or drying. Rigid foam too.

The slabs came from straight trunks and were left to settle for long enough that there should not be much, if any, warping.
Except Jim's piece of Ash. That's a twisted piece of Ash right there.

Any warping that does show up should be an easy job for one of the Router Planer ideas that we talked about in the other thread.
Router Planer


Now for projects :
https://www.pinterest.com/ Search for Wood Slab Projects and about 1 billion will pop up.
Wood Slab Ideas works good too.

Got my slabs!! (2 slab bonus) I got ideas. Stand back!!

Wow. Thank you VERY MUCH!!!

A follow up on a decent(er) video showing the use of epoxy on slabs for tables, shelves, countertops etc.

This fellow does a good job of showing the details of a few things that you should do, and a couple of things that are just plain wrong... I don't want to pick on his errors though... He ends up with a nicely finished slab despite the errors.

https://youtu.be/HOeRtajl0b0


The best difference between this and the other videos that I've posted is his use of the card scraping method. Card scrapers are under-utilized for what they can do.

1. Cut the slab roughly to size before you router-plane it.
2. Do choose your top and bottom, and pour epoxy into the bottom first. (Unless the voids in the bottom are to be left open.
3. Spend the time to calculate how much epoxy to mix. He wasted a LOT, for no good reason.

Casey stopped by this morning to pick up his & Dana's wood, so that concludes my part of the process.

Thanks to Mike for being so generous with the slabs, thanks to everyone who showed up to help unload (I guess me excepted since I bailed on the first night's unloading) or pick up their slabs, thanks to other folks for continuing the mule-age (that's a word), and thanks to the folks who contributed toward the fuel fund.

All and all, I think it went pretty well, other than the more-than-expected-traffic on the way down and subsequent delays.

Once you guys start building stuff, please start a new thread so we can see what becomes of Slab Quest 2018.

yep, a big thanks to Mike and David!

Hi... this is David's wife, Rita. I wanted to drop in to thank Mike, Nikki and The Balrog for a lovely afternoon at their place. The Balrog is amazing and simply adorable with a bright and engaging personality! She makes your heart melt and I left wishing we had a daughter of our own.

Cheers!
Rita Ho

What a sweet heart!

It seems clear to me that Priya and Rita got along quite well.

Those are some beautiful pics of some beautiful ladies.