What are the main ways of drying wood whether it be wood you milled into boards or just cut into turning blanks?
I have heard of sealing the end grain and then just leaving the piece to dry on it's own but then I believe there are even different ways to each of those.
Please share how you personally do it or how you have seen others do this.
I have heard of sealing the end grain and then just leaving the piece to dry on it's own but then I believe there are even different ways to each of those.
Yes that is the standard way of drying all wood, regardless of whether in board form or the type of piece that would be a turning blank.
The reason for sealing the end grain is to slow drying, since it is through the end grain that wood loses and takes on the most moisture.
As the goal is to get the wood to dry it seems counter-productive to do something that slows the process but unfortunately in most cases it is only by doing it slowly that you reduce the chances of various types of cracking defect and warpage. Force-drying as in a kiln is different since the wood is dried quickly but under controlled conditions.
How to seal end grain
If you don't use a commercial product made for the purpose (e.g. Anchorseal) the best thing to use to seal end grain is melted wax. Any type of wax will do so no harm in going cheap. Most of the wax can be recovered though, scraped from the end grain, remelted and reused indefinitely so it won't work out too expensive if you use something like beeswax.
There is much help online on this in all the woodworking forums that says you can coat the end grain with anything, and almost inevitably the next words typed will be "using latex paint" (UK: household emulsion) but this is bad advice and needs to stop being repeated. Paint of this type is actually far too porous to provide a good seal. Is it better than nothing? Probably. Is it actually a good way to go though? No.
If doing it with molten wax isn't feasible or too much hassle and a product like Anchorseal too expensive the next best things to use are varnish or oil-based enamel paint, both of which form a good water barrier in a thick coating. Ideally you'd want to slop either one on heavily, and if you want to go to the trouble to apply more than one coat so much the better.
You won't regret sealing end grain too heavily. You're sure to regret it if you seal it too lightly.
Note that with boards you usually (nearly always) dry them flat, stickered but with one or two species that are prone to staining the convention is to dry them vertically, which if you're doing it yourself will usually mean leaning against a wall. With turning blanks as well as with sticks it's quite common to dry them upright.
Speeding drying at home
You can sometimes get away with speeding up drying wood with smaller pieces. There is still the chance of checks, particularly with rounds or small log sections, but in general the smaller a piece of wood the less the risk. One of the best methods to do this at home on a small scale is using your microwave, but you may decide to buy a cheap second microwave for this purpose only if you do this regularly. Read more about that in Can I use a conventional oven or toaster oven as something similar to a dry kiln?
Note that you don't seal the end grain and then do this, for reasons that should be obvious :-)
I have used dehumidifiers to dry a load of reclaimed wood that was milled to use as trim in a home. It was at 20% moisture content (MC) so I made a frame of 2X material after I set a layer of 6 mil poly on the floor large enough to wrap the whole pile after I built the frame to support the plastic. The frame needed to be high enough to hold 2 dehumidifiers that sat on top of the pile and have it hold the plastic high enough to clear the dehumidifiers. This topped out at about 5' tall. It made it easy as well to enter the sealed area to empty the containers twice a day. About a gallon of water each time. After 2 weeks the material was dry enough to use. As a note the wood was stickered between each level of boards.
Drying can be accelerated by coating ends in wax and setting up a de-humidifier with its air outlet aimed at the wood stack (onto length of wood not onto the ends)
I have used one with great effect with the water collecting outlet via a small rubber tube out through the wall (no danger of the damp air re-moisting the wood)
I have also used an "air purifier" which does much the same job (with carbon filter removed) but over a longer period because the moisture isn't extracted as much
