How wide should stickers be?

[Radar67]

For those of you that do portable sawmilling for customers, do you supply the stickers for the customer, or do you make them suply their own?

You can cut them from the flitches if the customer does not want to supply or buy them. Or, sacrific a few boards for stickers from their logs.

Stew

[Tom]

I will cut stickers from the edgings for the customer and have been known to saw up a couple of logs.  I do request that they save them in the top of their barn in case they want to saw again.

[DanG]

I always cut stickers wherever I don't have enough log left to make something else.  I made a little rack that I toss them into, with slots for the chainsaw to cut the whole mess into lengths at once.  I always have plenty for my own use and for the customers, too.

When sawing someone else's logs, I do the same, but throw them on his pile at log length.  I don't charge for them.  Little things like that keeps'em coming back.

[getoverit]

since I'm just sitting here waiting on my mill to get here from NZ, I've been doing a LOT of reading. Some of it has to do with stickers, and from what I can see it's one of the most talked about subjects on this forum and several others.

I got out my engineering pencil and went to work drawing up a design for a sticker, based on common sticker sizes. Next, I added a few design features to prevent any type of staining or moisture holdup, and called someone in the extruding business about making a test batch for me of 1,000 stickers. The two main requirements were remaining solid to a temperature of 200 degrees F, and positively no seepage of any kind from the sticker material sutch as plasticizers, oil, glue, etc.

One other requirement was an ability to withstand 30 PSI load rating. I tried to find the heaviest wood I could find, and calculated what a 1" X 12" X 48" piece of it would weigh. Figuring that the highest that anyone stacks lumber is 8', and since every other inch is sticker, only 48" of it is actually wood weight. I then added a little to the weight just to have a security factor.

Anyway, I also added some other design features to the whole thing which should add to the strength and also to it's durability. I'm figuring that if they prove to be reliable, you can keep using them for years and years and load after load, even through the kiln process.

My hopes are that I can produce a sticker that will last for years and years, that is so cheap to purchase in the first place that you would be wasting valuable time to try to make any using normal sawing  processes.

I'll try to keep y'all posted on the design and testing process. 

[Dan_Shade]

what material are you considering?

[getoverit]

a high heat plastic and also a wood composite material