{"id":2652,"date":"2025-05-14T12:28:28","date_gmt":"2025-05-14T16:28:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/jsevy.com\/wordpress\/?page_id=2652"},"modified":"2025-05-14T12:31:47","modified_gmt":"2025-05-14T16:31:47","slug":"pinless-moisture-meters-a-penetrating-question","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/jsevy.com\/wordpress\/index.php\/lutherie\/pinless-moisture-meters-a-penetrating-question\/","title":{"rendered":"Pinless Moisture Meters: A Penetrating Question"},"content":{"rendered":"

I use a pinless moisture meter that I got from Amazon (Dr. Meter Pinless Wood Moisture Meter<\/a>) to measure moisture content in wood resawn for use in guitars, which is thin stock – about 3\/16″ thick as resawn. These use an electromagnetic field that penetrates the wood and is affected by the wood’s moisture content. I wondered whether this would be accurate on thin stock, since it seemed like the field could penetrate right through the stock and be looking partially at air on the other side. It seems like this is in fact happening: measurements on thin stock show lower moisture content than on thick stock, up to around 9\/16″ thickness; at this thickness and beyond, the readings stay consistent. But the depth of penetration of the field depends on the moisture content of the wood – the wetter the wood, the less the depth of penetration, so the readings are accurate even for thinner stock. The following describes some experiments I did to establish this.
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\nMethodology<\/span><\/span><\/h3>\n

I took some sets of resawn plates, each 3\/16″ thick (and quartersawn, though I wouldn’t expect that to make a difference in moisture measurements), stacked up 5 of them to make a thicker plate (about 1″ thick), and took a moisture measurement. I then removed one 3\/16″ plate at a time and re-did the measurement. The pictures below show the process.
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