Moisture meters

[PeteC]

Can anyone recommend a reliable and affordable moisture meter? Also , does anyone use the "pinless" meters ?  Can you get a true reading when testing " near bow dimension'  green staves that which don't allow for much pin penetration which could damage the bowstave?

[Eric Krewson]

I have used a pinless meter for 20 years, in bow making exact precision is not necessary although I feel that my meter is pretty accurate. I don't use the included table to calculate the reading to the species; all I want to know is when a piece of wood is obviously green and M/C is close to the ambient dry M/C for my area. I also want to know if the wood has dried to 16% or lower before I put it in my drying box, if I put staves with a higher M/C in the box they tend to check. 

I bought my first meter new, they don't make them anymore, when my first one quit after 20 years of use, I had the company refurbish it for $100. Batteries are junk now days, I tried to use my meter about 2 years ago and found that the batteries had leaked and destroyed the battery compartment.

These are pretty common on eBay, I bought a replacement for my destroyed one for $40 off eBay, it hadn't been used very much and worked like new.



I have no idea about the quality of current moisture meters, newer model meters like my old one are off the charts as far as price is concerned, perhaps some of the lower priced ones are actually good.

[PeteC]

Thanks for the info Eric. It sounds  funny for me to be curious about a moisture meter when I have been building self-bows for over 30 years without one.   I was able to get 10 logs of Kansas osage in May. I have been busy taking some down to bow dimension and clamping to forms , taking some down to 2X2" with the bark on, and others just storing as full staves. I have always gone by the one inch / year curing mindset, but had an interest of checking the staves progress with a meter.  God Bless

[Eric Krewson]

Did you spray the bark on staves with bug killer? Wood wasps and powder post beetles seem to go to work as soon as the tree hits the ground, removing the bark and sapwood is the only sure cure for these pests. I have lost a lot of wood to them when I cut more osage than I could handle in a reasonable length of time. You can often recover a stave from wood wasp larva if you catch it in time, powder post beetles are the worst, they go in the top of a log and go out the bottom, destroying the stave in the process.

This is what they do inside a log.