Wood Drying Tunnel Thing

Hello everyone,

I am wanting to design and build a place to dry wood that I am cutting at my place. Most of it is pine, but I think the theory is the same - I need a dry ventilated area. I can look into the shipping container idea on this other thread, Drying Sawn Lumber permies dot com but I was picturing something somehow less expensive than 3-6k,

I am basically asking if people can weigh in with design suggestions?

I have for one option a set of garage door tracks   not very good stock photo of garage door tracks (doesn't show the legs well)  and I thought perhaps to string them together with some 2x4 I have laying about, then put a billboard plastic on top of a corresponding size such as from this random example of a used billboard plastic reseller

I would love to keep cost to like 200-300 and have it be a project that doesn't need to have a year of planning and thought and cost ton of money, where I can dry bamboo, a lot of small pines I am clearing and want to do some experimental log buildings with, and some large pines after it is sawn into dimensional lumber for a tiny house.  


many thanks to anyone who can suggest some design ideas, they do NOT have to involve the materials I already have. I just haven't seen a plan for a place to dry lumber and I need to make one.

Cheers!

Hi Gina;
How much wood are you thinking?  Whole logs? Cut logs? What length's?  
Or are you cutting boards and want to dry them ?
Logs are easy to store they just need to be off the ground and under a roof of sorts. Wind & temps will take care of the  rest.
Boards on the other hand need sticker stacked to dry as well as a roof and they may still warp on you.

Depending on size and amounts. A portable car shelter might be enough to protect your wood.

Thanks for responding!  

I have a few acres of pine saplings, that are about 3-6 inch diameter, I want to dry those and use them to make some tiny houses - something like this diameter. There will be a fair number of those but I may not be able to harvest them all at once anyway. I thought about stacking them in a check pattern so that they would dry faster.

The dimensional lumber, there are 16 pines at 70 ft tall, it's probably cheaper to do those all at once, so that is probably the main concern.

I am picturing this thing being something I can disassemble after using the lumber, and replace with something smaller (eg a little low tunnel) for drying bamboo on an ongoing basis.

I was able to dry a couple dozen pine logs (4-10" dia) by making an A frame from a bunch of long pallets.  I just tilted them against one another and screwed them together.  With another pallet as the floor I stacked the pine logs in there.  Then I put lumber tarping from the home center on top.  With open ends they dried nicely.  

But if you need to do hundreds to thousands of logs it would need to be much bigger.

16 good size trees cut into lumber may be a healthy size pile.  They can be stacked outside on solid, level bases (off the ground), stickered properly and then just have a crude metal roof set on the top of the pile to keep them dryish.

those are both great ideas and easy on the engineering muscle, thank you!