I'm making some huge poster frames out of walnut. An actual *commissioned* project, so I have to see it through to the end.
I made my list, checked it twice and figured out which bits were naughty and nice, and it all _just_ worked out in terms of yielding what I needed out of the board. There's not much left other than sawdust and shavings. All in all a good job of planning the cuts.
All except for the stress I unlocked in the wood, and the resultant horribly twisted pieces. The long ones are 42", and some of them rise as much as 5" in the middle. Adding insult to injury, many of them are actually bowed along two different axes simultaneously.
I've seen wood move a little before, and usually I could just fudge it into behaving by using some extra mechanical fasteners and lots of clamps, but that isn't going to work this time. These things pretty much came off the saw warped all to hell. Worse exponentially than anything I've ever seen before. Perhaps because these are so much longer than what I normally work with. Perhaps indeed.
I don't see any way to put them under enough tension to hold the bow at bay, and there's not enough wood to these things to plane them flat.
Is my only choice at this point to pretty much chalk it up to experience and make a lot of pen blanks out of these?
How can I avoid the problem in the future? Wider pieces? Let the wood season in my shop for a few weeks before cutting? Cut on a less rainy day? Choose lumber more carefully? Cut up shorter boards? Cut grossly oversized pieces and plan on planing 1/2 or more of it away to account for the inevitable?
I could use some real advice on this one. I can salvage some of these if they don't warp any worse (are they likely to?), but some of this stuff is practially little better than kindling. I'm going to go over budget on this one, and I want to minimize my losses.