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I have seen the term "stickering wood" mentioned on a few other sites, but no one seems inclined to define what it means.

Is this where you pile wood in stacks with sticks between the boards to allow airflow? Is this a labeling method where you place a sticker on a grouped set of boards?

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  • Stickering in some places also called stripping or filleting I believe. Col. B
    – user2268
    May 19 '16 at 6:57
18

It's the former, piling wood in stacks with sticks between them to allow better air flow while also maintaining an even pressure throughout the pieces to limit cupping or warping that occurs during the drying process.

You can't really see the sticks in this photo, but this wood has been stickered:

wood piled with space in between caused by stickering the wood By edward stojakovic from chicago, United States (Neat organized wood drying rack) CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

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  • Good answer, but I would suggest replacing the image with one that clearly shows the stickers, and perhaps adding a diagram to illustrate the air flow, weights on top, etc.
    – rob ♦
    Mar 31 '15 at 18:06
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    @rob, yes, there are better images out there. However this was the only one I could find that allowed re-use. All of the blogs and company pages I checked out were "All rights reserved".
    – drs
    Mar 31 '15 at 18:09
  • You can clearly see the sticks being talked about at the bottom left hand side of the image.
    – Pᴀᴜʟsᴛᴇʀ2
    Mar 31 '15 at 22:58
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    A point that may not be clear here is the sticks are generally all in the same position, so the weight of the wood travels straight down them and doesn't cause any bending force on any of the wood. That's one of the more important parts of this. Each piece of wood supports the weight of the wood above it only through compressive force where the sticks are.
    – Jason C
    Dec 16 '15 at 23:06
6

In most cases I've seen this term in reference to how to stack layers of cut timber/lumber to air dry. Typically, reusable sticks of uniformly cut 'strips' are used to space the wood apart for better air circulation. This is particularly important if/when wood is cut or resawn from green wood where the moisture content can be very high.

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