It is called "seasoning". It is how most lutherie wood was stored in the past. Sometimes in an attic where it froze in the winter and cooked in the summer. Sometimes in an unheated shed "out back", or in a pile covered with a tarp. And the moisture content cycled with the seasons. Over the course of a few decades, much of the stress in the wood was "worked out". Some wood did crack, split, or warp worse, so it was culled out before any effort was wasted attempting to make it into an instrument. That is why you used to hear about lutherie wood needing to be seasoned for 25 years or more.
We no longer do this. Now we coddle our wood in controlled environments....it never gets "seasoned", even if it does sit for decades. And when the humidity control goes south in our shops, wood starts cracking, and warping, and we go into panic. We no longer have seasoned wood to work with.
I do season my wood as best I can. When I had some huge cocobolo logs sawn into cants in 2004, they then spent the next 3 years outside under a tarp...covered with snow in the winter and filtered sun on them in the summer. Most of my un-sawn wood is stored in an unheated metal shed, and right now, it is freezing in there.
Alas, I guess most of us are stuck in this cycle because the wood we have access to never starts out being treated correctly, so we have to go with what we are served up with. But where the opportunity presents itself "DON'T CODDLE THE DAM WOOD"
There, I got that off my chest
![[headinwall]](./images/smilies/headbangwalluf8.gif "Mad")
Grant
