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3x16x4 for $3.15 (aprox)

2K views 11 replies 4 participants last post by  Dal300 
#1 ·
3x16x4 for $3.15 (aprox)

I have a tree service that will deliver 4.5' trunk sections of oak and walnut to my home, and a mill about 30 miles away that will rip them to my specs for $0.35 a board foot.

With materials this cheap, I'm in business. I could even sell the stuff to other woodworker for a song.
 
#2 ·
Except…. Tree services are going to be bringing you Yard trees that every kid in the neighborhood for the last 50 years has been pounding nails in. When you take those to your local sawyer, he's going to run those though his Woodmizer and charge you for every blade that is ruined.
Woodmizer blades aren't cheap, For the price of a couple of them you can buy an equivalent amount of rough cut wood. Then there is the drying. In your pricing are you counting Kiln drying for a month or two or is it air drying for a year or more?

I don't have a nice big saw to make lumber out of, but I do use my old 12" Craftsman on wood I get here in the yard. That means everything has to be cut to less than 6" so it can go through the band saw. Mostly what you get then is about 4" usable and the rest is scrap or BBQ smoking wood.

I use to use the nice fancy blades to do the resawing with but that got expensive. It only takes one nail or bullet to remove the carbide teeth of a half inch bandsaw blade. Now I use the cheaper, (much Cheaper) Olson Pro blades. They are cheaper, and for rough cutting work just fine and when I lose one to a chunk of metal I've only lost about $14 instead of $150.

YMMV.

Good Luck with your endeavor!

DF
 
#5 ·
I agree a good metal detector is a must have with that kind of material . Another asset would be to make you own kiln because it's going to be a long time before that woods dry enough to use on anything but rough out turnings.
 
#6 ·
Jim, would you suggest letting the logs dry naturally, or go ahead and rip them and let them dry afterward. I'm not cutting these small, I want to keep them at least 3 inches thick except the outside with bark, those will be 4 or 5 inches thick for benches.
 
#9 ·
Russ
As wood drys it tends to cup or twist depending and a lot of factors like if it drys equally on both sides ,internal stress,How much sun exposer it has . I would say if you build a bench or anything out of green wood don't put a lot of effort in it, because odds are good you will have wood that moves and might make the bench not some thing you can use. This is part of the reason green wood is so much cheaper than dry wood.
 
#11 ·
Hard to tell you Russ it has a lot to do with what kind of weather you have and the type of kiln you make. The thicker the wood the longer it takes wood that has been milled drys from both sides but if you just have one side exposed to air
it takes a lot longer. I would suggest you do a little googeling on drying wood,wood properties, and building a kiln.
her'es one.
http://www.builditsolar.com/Projects/WoodDrying/wood_kiln.htm
 
#12 ·
Russ, you may also want to look up powered drying kilns. The kiln doesn't need to have a lot of heat but it does need enough to keep the temperature significantly above ambient.
The other thing would be a way to remove the moisture generated by the heat. I have a small kiln I built that uses the guts from an old convection oven. It was a glorified toaster oven at one time. Now it will handle a 4' stack of wood that is 2'2" tall and 2'8" wide.
White oak dries in about 30 days if I turn it often and make sure there is air flow through the oven.

As a test I am doing some 2' x 6" x 6/4 in our oven set at 180° and I open the oven door about every 30 minutes to release the moisture. Started this with the same amount of wood the same type from the same log in the kiln.
As a side point, I've done wood in the oven before and can usually get it down to about 12% in about 8 hours although there are more twists and bends.

As for the band saw blades… when I worked as a sawyer in Southern Indiana e used the cheaper blades for awhile until we found that sharpening and setting costs were out the window when trying to charge a customer. At one time I went through at least 10 different blades in one day slabbing a log. I also spent at least an extra 8 hours resharpening them…. not covered in the contract, directly. The mill owner got his money back via miscellaneous costs and I got nothing. I only got paid for bd ft cut.
When we went to carbide toothed blades my income went up by 40% and downtime was almost zero. The mill owner made more money and the log owners were happy with the lower overall costs.

Watch out for those hidden costs.

Again, good luck to ya.
 
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