Drying wood for the first time

[PRSpoggers]

Hey y'all, so I am buying some white limba neck blanks and Honduran Rosewood fingerboard blanks from an exotic wood dealer in Annapolis Maryland and I am curious, do I have to dry the wood for a month to 3 or 4 months or would it be ready to go after plaining the wood?

[curtisa]

What does the seller say about their products? Are they being sold to you as dried and ready to use or undried?

Adding additional drying time to the timber may not be a bad thing, as it allows the wood to become somewhat acclimated to the environment where you're going to work with it. But your question is better directed to the seller of the timber.

[Bizman62]

As @curtisa said, acclimating the wood is often recommendable. Let it settle down so it matches with the environment where it will spend most of the time as a guitar.

The body of my current project is from a poplar that was felled several years ago in late fall after all the leaves had fallen and most of the juices were sucked to the roots. The block was buried under snow all winter long in my yard waiting for me to find someone to saw it to blanks. Halfways in the summer I noticed that there's some sort of fungi at the end that was touching ground so I took my chainsaw and rough cut a few 5" blanks which I stored on the beams in my wood shed. Last winter after a few years of drying I finally took them to the workshop and cut them to 1½-2" bookmatched pieces and even after that I let the pieces dry for months indoors until I started building the body out of one.

For kiln dried wood you don't need that long, but a few months indoors won't hurt. Put slats both underneath and between the blanks to ensure air circulation and prevent warping. Here's an old sketch of storing wood at home: