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Morning Hesh!

Stickering is as you say, placing stick between the wood to allow air flow. I use pine because I get it free from work, although its not the best thing. I believe Mario recomends melimine (sp) its that thin particle board with a white coating. Cut your stings from it and place is so that the white side is on top and bottom. I use 4 slices for sides and 3 for tops and backs.
For humidity control. I keep my shop between 43 and 46*RH. My dehumidifier does a pretty good job of that. Also my shop which is in my basement is heated and cooled by the homes furnace/air system, actualy my entire basement is.

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Lance@LuthiersForum.com

I like to use 4 on tops and backs, and 5 on sides. I just rip slices off of 2x4's and cut them to length. The melamine is better. If a piece of wood has a tendency to cup, I stack cinder blocks on top of the pile, or put that wood at the bottom of the pile. Either way, the cinder blocks usually end up on there if the wood is fresh. If the wood is dry and stable, I don't sticker, because my RH is fairly constant.

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"I want to know what kind of pickups Vince Gill uses in his Tele, because if I had those, as good of a player as I am, I'm sure I could make it sound like that.
Only badly."

Hesh, I think that once the wood is aclimitized to your shop, sitckering is not that critical if your humidity is pretty stable. Then again your's swings every time you take a shower.
It's not really rocket science as some people make it. Like you said, you just want air flow in between the wood. My stack of new wood gets 1/8" stickers (I use cedar because it's what I had on hand), 4 for tops and backs, 5 for sides. If you weight it (recomended) make sure the stickers are right on top of each other.
I built a rack based on one that Bob C ? made. It has 8 pieces of all thread sticking out of a board that is bigger than my biggest top. The all thread is epoxied into t-nuts in the board. The stickers on this contraption all have two holes in them which will slide over the all thread. So I slide stickers on, lay a top on, slide stickers on, lay a top on, and so on. When I am done, I screw on a star knob on each piece of all thread until all is snug. Instant drying rack. The handy thing about this is that you can move the whole stack pretty easily. The un-handy thing is that it will take seperate racks for backs/tops and sides.
Once the wood has been stickered in my shop for about 6 months, I restack it without stickers. But my shop varies only about 3% in the worst conditions.

Best place to store YOUR wood is My house!!!

I have outgrown my storage shelf and have wood stacked here and there wherever I can find a spot to set it down. I will be building another soon and move the jigs and other small items off that shelf to make more room for wood. I usually use 3 stickers for top/backs and 4 for sides.
See what you have caused BobC.

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Tickle your guitar daily, and it'll tickle you back.

Hesh, if you need more room for your " getting bigger by the minute stash", why not send me your gitter collection, you should be able to acquire an entire palette like Paddy!

Hesh,

I'm sure lots of other folks will weigh in on this one. I'm still very much learning about the properties of wood, btw, and I would strongly recommend you pick up a copy of Understanding Wood, by R. Bruce Hoadley. But anyway, here's what I do:

Stickers: I cut strips from 1/4" plywood or other scrap such that they can be laid flat resulting in at least a 1/8" space. I think three is sufficient for tops and backs, but you might need four or five for side sets.   I I sticker all pieces, including laying stickers down below the bottom piece. Place the edge stickers as close to the edge as possible, and insure that they are all in line with each other. This will reduce the chance of warpage. I don't usually use weights, although sometimes I will if the pieces look to have a but of cupping. If the cupping is severe (due to case hardening), then another procedure is required, involving long soaks of the wood, stickering, and clamping, then allowing it to dry in a well ventilated area.

I do this for wood that isn't going to be used for a while, and I store it outdoors on shelves on my covered patio where rain cannot get to it directly. Why outdoors? Something I picked up from Grant Goltz. He sez that wood needs to go through the processes of expansion and contraction as it is being seasoned, and that if one stores the wood in a humidity controlled environment instead, then it is not going through this necessary seasoning process. Hope I got that right, but it makes sense to me.

Then, when it's getting close to time to use the wood, I take it indoors, where the humidity is controlled, and sticker it again, so it can reach equilibrium more quickly.

If the wood is not going to be used immediately, but providing that it has had sufficient time to reach equilibrium, I will often unsticker it, and just stack it. This doesn't seem to hurt things at all. I have about forty or so top sets that are stacked (inside) and have been stacked for over a year, and they show no signs of stress, warpage, etc.

Here are a few photos of some of my stash, such that it is:




Best,

Michael

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Live to Play, Play to Live

    I use alot of wood and unless you have forced air flow you want to have the sticks 3/4". This allows for natural convection currents.
     While gravity clamps work I do use bar clamps. I will set the sicks in a verticle line and clamp there so all sets are pressed.
    Wood will cup no matter what unless you really have them dried so keep them under weight. I will kiln my wood to dry it for stability reasons and you can make a kiln easy enough. I use a deep chest freezer with 2 100 watt light bulbs. It can get to 150 degrees easy. After about a month I am at 6%. I keep the top open about 1/4"
    Also if you just have the wood in your shop , remove it once in a while ( about every month ) and flip it. Allow air to get on all sides .
good luck
john hall

I have all my sets (most of which were dry when I got 'em) stickered on shelves in my assembly room, which is humidity controlled (I'm happy if it's between 38 and 46%). Almost all the sets I have stay flat on their own, so I mostly don't use weights or anything, and I probably wouldn't even have to have them stickered at all. But I figure the continued air flow over time can only help and not hurt. On a 12" wide shelf I can put the two sides side-by-side, then put the two halves of the back one on top of the other, all in the same stack, 3 stickers per layer, then add the next set. So, from the bottom up, it's: shelf - 3 stickers - sides - 3 stickers - half back - 3 stickers - other half back - 3 stickers - sides of next set - etc. This keeps the sets together, which I like. The ends of the sides are unsupported, but this doesn't matter, since they are flat and stable already (I do it differently if the wood is green). I do make sure the stickers are all vertically lined up.

For stickers, I use 3/4" ash (leftover boards from making flooring for my house out of ash trees on our land). I use the band saw to rip slices about 3/16" thick. Even if your wood is green, I don't think you need 1/2" space between layers, and that would take up a lot more storage space (and use up a lot more sticker wood).

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Todd Rose
Ithaca, NY

https://www.dreamingrosesecobnb.com/todds-art-music

https://www.facebook.com/ToddRoseGuitars/

I just read John's post, and he may be right about 3/4" space being better if your wood is green.

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Todd Rose
Ithaca, NY

https://www.dreamingrosesecobnb.com/todds-art-music

https://www.facebook.com/ToddRoseGuitars/

I stickered all the sets I've accumulated...w/ high hopes. Using pieces of a Pergo-like flooring, that I cut-up to various sizes from a leftover floor I put down. The stuff is rock-hard! I think it's a 1/4" thick. Relatively cheap and it won't bleed. On some pieces that were out of whack, I just weighed them down w/ 12 lb. sandbags. The others, I stuck some sticks, pushing w/ downward force from the above shelf onto the tops of the stacks...



RichB38870.5969212963

Hesh, following up on Paul Woolsons comment about "once the wood aclimates there is no need for stickers" I have to agree. While at Bryan Galloups shop one day I seen some of his personal stash of BRW fitch matched just loosly stacked under a work bench. I asked him why its not stickered, he said, no need, once is aclimated"

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Lance@LuthiersForum.com

I don't worry about humidity control for sets I'm not building with right now; none of my wood qualifies as green, so I sticker it for about 3-4 months in individual sets, 1/4" stickers (ply), 4 for backs, 5 for sides, and then just stack per species with stickers between them (to prevent any chance of weird discoloration happening, and to keep things looking organized. My tops are acutally just stacked, not stickered at all, because they seem to be very stable like that, and I don't have the space to sticker them right now. This was before I added about 3x as much wood in the same amount of space:



The shelf is made of neck blanks, under that, bracing stock, on top, strips for kerfing as a shelf with the tops stacked on top. The backs live below the TV. Bridge blanks top right. I like to keep the flat stuff weighted and semi-stickered simply because I can't control the humidity precisely.

Mine looks just like everyone elses. I only have 8 sets, and only 3 tops.

I did see, in one of my woodworking mags this week, someone making stickers out of pvc pipe. Just cut them in half lengthwise and you have stickers with less contact with the wood. I've got enough scrap pine around, though, so that's what I use.

Ron

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OLD MAN formerly (and formally) known as:

Ron Wisdom

Somewhere in the middle of Arkansas......

Same as my bud Ron for the pine although his stash is bigger than mine as i have 2 sets left in the stash!