Quote Originally Posted by rjustice View Post
Craig,
When i first started carving i felt the same way about the Poplar, and also found that it left a lot of fuzzies to clean up. Just by a fluke I recently carved a piece that had set in the garage for about 2 years, and used it to test a design, and found it to carve very nicely. The only difference was that it had been setting around so long. I purchased another piece, and it was somewhat fuzzy again. So, i checked the moisture of the wood, and sure enough the new board from Lowes had almost twice the moisture content of the old piece... So moral of the story is that dry Poplar definitely carves "cleaner" and "crisper".

Terry,
Very nice job on the sign... It looks great!
Moisture content really does affect the machined finish quality on the CW or any other machine. More often than not if I have a lot of fuzzing coming out of the shaper or planner I can quickly trace it back to high MC in the wood regardless of the species.

None of my lumber suppliers store wood in a climate controlled environment, and my shop is not controlled either, so the relative humidity has a big effect on my stock. I'm surrounded by who knows how many acres of god awful swamps, right between two of the Great lakes and 15,000 not so great lakes, and we have had buckets of rain the last couple of weeks. So some days my shop floor sweats as bad as I do.

Actually I have some 2"x4" in the lumber rack today that I could swear were 1"x4" this spring.......lol