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I've learned a lot from you about managing our woodlot we inherited. Your data about how much wood volume growth per acre every year is what made me confident I could turn our land into a sustainable woodworking business. Thanks for your content
I've owned a 6" Lucas mill since 2009 when I bought it used during the financial crisis. I tell people that milling your own lumber only makes sense if you are getting other benefits at the same time. Forest thinning, garden or orchard space, fire safety. Etc. If you were going to have to cut the tree and clean the mess anyway then milling can be worth it. If you want cheap boards, just go to the store.
When people start new processes, they often lose sight of what their original goals were and start comparting themselves to what others are doing without realizing that those "others" have different goals. At the bottom end of the small portable sawmills, none of them can compete on a board foot basis with commercial production.....if you fairly cost your labor. However all of them provide the flexibility for production not available at Home Depot. If you want to build of log cabin from "D" logs, nothing is better than a lower end portable sawmill. Similar if you want barn siding and don't live next to someone already in that business (which is fortunately becoming more common). If you want commercial dimensional lumber and live in a state that allows its ungraded use, you will need a major upgrade to compete. None of these small mills pose a threat to the big box stores for common lumber. What they excel at is providing products not readily commercially available and for turning your culls into profitable products.
I built my mill knowing it was not going to be extremely productive for smaller logs. I just accept that fact and enjoy it when I’m milling stuff that I built it to cut, monster trees.
Another uneconomic theme that jumps out of saw mill videos is how often sawyers get extreme in the amount of equipment they buy! In a one-man operation, it's all to easy to forget the new seat takes you out of the old seat so often neither actually pays.
Just milled up some cedar for our family lake dock build. 3"x8"'s , logs were free. Time was " free" a real enjoyable day and great finished products. Especially when it'll be used by us for 20-30 years. Not often a hobby actually saves you money
You need to learn too little bit more about running a saw mill. Smaller logs do not equal less production. Actually larger logs can often be slower. ] Give me 8-12" over 24" logs all day long if I'm sawing for production. Give me larger logs if I'm sawing for quality. I of course don't know squat about this having only sawed north of 500k board feet. And am on my 4th sawmill.
Just a few notes. I'm a big one also on tracking and recording productivity and deducing costs and profit potentials, another weird dude. Process can be VERY important, both in time it takes but also in enjoyment and labor savings. One interesting thing with milling is that having a helper more than doubles your productive time. Some jobs are of a nature that process can allow you to be as efficient as possible and adding additional manpower is just at best a doubling of production, milling can be one of those jobs where having an additional person assisting with stacking cut wood, taking off the offcuts and assisting with loading the logs on can more than double your productive time, so having a helper can be an excellent way to boost production. Another note is the value adding. Creating and selling raw lumber for basic construction is the lowest value for time on your mill. If you take the wood you produce and create something with it, you start multiplying your value across production chains. There are many people that make cabinets and finished woodworking that start with hauling in their own logs and milling them, as you remove yourself further from the resource chain and bring home gathering and producing, you can multiply your overall value quite dramatically. I live in sawmill country myself where, out of 27 local households there's about 12 sawmills (small scale personal ones) and thats only counting the bandsaws not the neighbors with chainsaw mills. We are also over 100km from the nearest town so everyone harvests and produces the wood for their own projects locally. Some neighbors even do finished woodworking products that add incredible amounts of value to a given log. So to increase the value of your time you can improve your process (small to medium gains), value add by turning your raw wood into finished products (massive gain in value) or also focus outside of the optimized market, find and mill rare and more valueable species beyond the normal softwood construction wood that you will find in home depot. The last option relies more on availability in your area, where I live its all poplar, fir and pine, rarely any cedar, and very little hardwood of note, so adding value by milling valuable species is not a viable option. I've run the numbers on my own milling, for the purposes of deciding on quotable pricing for neighbors for milling but also knowing where that cost to them is better than buying wood at a local building supply. Essentially based on the current prices of softwood, the cost of the mill, depreciation on the mill, cost of maintenance and materials and a modest wage to justify the work, I clock in milling to cost around $1.48/bf (canadian). For someone looking to hire me, this means milling anything less than 2x8's is more costly than buying the wood from a local store. This isn't a 'get rich' price either and accounts only a $20/hr wage for myself, the remainder being maintenance, allocation for paying for the mill based on 5000hr replacement time, fuel and devaluing milled wood by 30% vs store bought due to the lack of planed dimension and kiln drying and sanding and the fact that you have to deal with variation in dimension with rough sawn. My hourly bf production is around 166bf/hr, but this is based on a properly setup area and log stacks for convenient loading in such a way a that the work goes optimally. This is also time for finished stacked wood and based on recording times for actual finished projects and their board footage, rather than a per cant basis. My personal takeaway from tracking things like this and crunching the numbers over time is to not mill logs less than 12" tops, unless its just for funsies and if you want to make your milling have value, either keep it to a minimum size of boards you produce for sale (2x8+) or value add what you produce, either by using it for yourself and reducing big bills for lumber, or producing more valuable products for sale.
I bet a simple slab/off-cut rack would be easy to build/incorporate. Typical X frames with spacing @ the depth of your fireplace. This one is one I want to build for branches but a little complicated ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-ZwwlgAt6cpY.html
I've been buying wood from home depot all over the country for more than 2 decades and a lot of their wood sucks. The last time I went the wood was the most beautiful wood I've ever seen ALL of it was straight and defect-free. It looks like furniture 2x4s I don't know where they got it from but they need to buy from them all the time. It was still hard to pay almost 4 bucks for a 2x4x8
I pick on Home Depot because its a bit of a joke in the community. The Irving 2x4s they sell are usually pretty good. The problem often times comes from people leaving the worst boards, which after a stack is half depleted come to create a sort of cover over the remainder of the stack, making it look like they are all bad. But they also have their "premium" selection which are almost always good, albeit more expensive. But at the end of the day, you just arent going to get consistently great lumber from 4 inch top sizes or the top log of a knotty fir. Ive had several experiences of these boards breaking in my truck on my way home from the store.
That could be right. I thought I double checked the manual, but I can often misquote things. Ive mostly been milling smaller logs, so I havent been testing the upper limits.
It’s also important to factor in all the costs - transport etc. If you are selling to the end user you have no intermediary cost and retail sale price. That compensates for a lot of productivity. The trick is to serve a niche and optimise your processes to maximise your total return on investment- both capital and sweat. Another example is the smallholder who can sell all their products to family, friends and farmstall, but the commercial farmer has to sell the vast majority to the wholesale market. In the UK the farmer gets about the same price for a sheep as the butcher charges for a leg.
I bought the same sawmill that you have. I only have 25 acres of timber and it's perfect for thinning trees and milling my own lumber. And it lets me sell a little lumber.
The minimum diameter for your productivity makes sense. I believe 8" small end diameter is the minimum size a lot of large-scale mills will take--at least the ones I've been around.
If we are talking about value produced, it might be #1, but here Im defining productivity as just board feet per hour. Similar logs of different species will have the same volume, so the biggest difference between species will be the wood density. Id be interested in testing that variable someday, but I havent harvested any of my hardwood yet.
@thetimberlandinvestor that was my thought , mills are going to cut hardwood much slower than softwood & blades will need to be sharpened more frequently for hardwood. Great vid , the devils in the details
Interesting difference between Maine and my part of the PNW. Woodburning stoves are very regulated here. Yearly inspections and standards for emissions, along with a bump to home owners insurance for woodburning appliances have caused most people to turn to gas stoves. Firewood is not really a value added commodity here. I produce way more firewood than I can sell or burn. Its a problem.
Anything going on with the little smokeless patio stoves people burn in the back yard for entertainment? Pieces need to cut smaller, but it is an outlet.
Thanks great content as usual!! do you own forest land in Mexico? Or what state are you operating out of? You probably mentioned it before but I don’t recall it.
