Moisture content, kiln drying purposes of solid wood flooring

Solid wood flooring normally uses broad leaf hardwood. Middle and high grade solid

wood flooring mainly use high-quality imported timbers.

Reasonable production procedures are:

1  machine the log into slab,

2 wax the plate end to avoid crack at first,

3 sell to factories and do artificial kiln drying

4 make them into finished flooring.

Artificial kiln drying is the important factor that can ensure the quality of solid wood

flooring. It aims to keep the flooring in form and can not shrink, expand, deform in later

use. Meanwhile, we can also enhance the processability, usability and durability. The key

to the drying quality is that the final moisture content must a little lower than that of the

environmental conditions. 10% to 12% in southern China, 8% to 10% in northern China, 6%

to 8% in northwestern China. We must also ensure that they are completely dry and would

not warp, crack and remove the internal stress.

The drying quality and cost are constrained to each other in usual conditions, but if we

have sound drying equiptments, drying techniques, and operation, we can ensure the

quality and reduce investment and cost at the same time.

As there are many drying approaches and equiptments which have different quality in the

market, we write this paper as reference for hardwood flooring factories to purchase

drying equiptments.