I've decided to make a pizza peel from aluminium sheet with an ash handle, and because aluminium sheet isn't very strong I'm going for a full tang construction. As ash is nice to work green, I've roughly shaped the wood, which was still growing yesterday, and I now have a pair of scales, roughly 1.5 cm thick by 3 cm wide.
When making full tang knives, it seems to be common to epoxy the scales onto the tang for shaping, before finally pinning them for strength (necessary in a knife, perhaps less so in a pizza peel, depending on how good the bond to the metal is). I'll either use it without a handle or make something temporary until the ash is ready. Once glued on, I'll want to finish the job fairly quickly, finishing the wood with either BLO or varnish (I haven't decided yet).
An attempt at measuring moisture content with basic tools (edit): I've weighed the wood, and approximately calculated its volume and therefore density . Comparing that to published weights for "dry" (unspecified but I assumed 10% as 8-12% seems to be a reasonable range depending on use) I get 26%. Sticking a couple of pins in, measuring the resistance with a multimeter, and referring to an old chart (reprinted here) I get a surprisingly similar value, however even taking into account the seasonal variation in moisture content of growing timber this figure is rather low. I suspect I've had a fair bit of surface drying already.
How much seasoning is needed before I can epoxy the ash onto the aluminium? If either of my proposed finishes would require much longer seasoning, it would be nice to know, to minimise the amount of time it's half-finished