I have to make some clarifications and "advises" on some of the issues raised/mentioned by some folks that posted after my first post and I would start with the issue of moisture meter Vs digital scales.
Yes, a kitchen type digital scales are great to control the moisture if you are either storing the wood for some time or, wanting to oven dry or microwave it, by making original readings and then compare as it dries until stop losing weight, that is a safe point to be however, the scales are of no use if you buy blanks that you need to get working on them immediately or within a short time from arriving/acquiring, in that these cases the only way to get an idea of the approx. MC% content is using a moisture meter.
Now, not all moisture meters are the same and you can spend $1,000 or more in a "professional/verified/calibrated" moisture meter, these are often used in the wood industry and by inspectors and read 100% as wet wood but not the type of meter you really need for our purpose. Sure, if you have the money and want to be accurate within 0.01% please yourself and buy it.
The type of moisture meter I'm referring to as inexpensive can be easily be purchased on eBay or Amazon for $20 to 30 and sometimes less, their accuracy is sufficient for what we do, 1 or 2% accuracy is very workable and will give you an immediate response to the question "how dry is it...?". Now, remember what I said about the MC% variations on different woods when classified as dry.
One of the most annoying and confusing aspects of these more economic moisture meters is the fact that each manufacturer uses a different total % reading scale, what this means is that some MM read from 39% as fully wet up to 99%. I have a few and each one reads different, I purchased them because they are cheap and I wanted to try them all and compare accuracy.
If I remember correctly, the ones I have its max. reads 39%, 45%, 52%, 68%, 79% and 99%, with such a difference it becomes very confusing. If you have the wood with you, you can easily put YOUR moisture meter on that wood and have its reading that you then have to remember what the wet % is and work out the percentages to what should be dry wood.
Where things get ugly is when you buy wood that is specified with a certain MC% but you don't know which type of MM was used and therefore the "wet reading" scale of that unit. It can say for example 12% and with many woods that is fairly dry, if the MM scale is low such as 99% however, if the MM scale is 39% for wet wood, the 12% is a lot wet.
For all these reasons and considering that most commercial wood processors use MM with 100% reading capabilities and the fact that I find it a lot less complicated to know that wet is 99/100%, half dry is about 50% and dry starts at 17% depending on the woods.
And lastly, don't be so trusty of what classification is given to the wood ones is trying to sell, different people use different terms to classify what they've got, some are telling you what they know but other will use the terms that they know people will prefer such as "seasoned". I've got Olive wood logs that have been "seasoning" for almost 12 years and some of them will crack like crazy when processed and the wood still reads 30% or more at its core.
The most accurate and best way to dry wood is by Kiln, if the processes are right and left there for the necessary time, you will have the most stable wood you can get however some still crack.
Again, I'm not trying to be complicated, I'm simply stating facts from own experience and knowledge of the industry.
Cheers
George