how many mbf in a cord of wood?? (oak)

[Gary_C]

From Gary_C:    "......but are there tables that give you cords based on DBH also?"

Yep.  Want me to mail you one?

Sure, I'll PM you my address. Thanks for the offer.

[SwampDonkey]

Gary be aware of site index with any of these tables and suppression usually drops you down a class because height is restricted like where you have aspen beating the tops of the fir. Here in my area I have 4 index curves each for softwood and hardwood. One table don't fit all sites, unless you get what we call the average. My table 5 and 10 are the averaged sites. 1-4 are softwood, 6-9 are hardwood.

[SwampDonkey]

I guess why we use total merchantable volumes in this region is we have total utilization. Ok, say you have a pile of chips off the planer mill over here, then a pile of sawdust off the saw and over there the jacket wood and another pile of hog fuel (bark and rot). And finally the lumber stacked for drying. How much volume (estimated basis) of each of those piles came from my land, Joe's land and Dave's land? My woods harvest was covering 50 acres, Joe's 80 acres and Dave's 15 acres. By using total merchantable volume, measured at dbh outside of the bark you know how much of each off each guy's land by scaling for the whole log, not just recoverable lumber. Seems to me unless that jacket wood and bark is tossed away someone has themselves a stacked deck. And they are selling pulping and hog fuel material that isn't being accounted for in the cruising and scaling to pay the owner of that timber. I know from the stand point of a lumber based mill you are only interested in saw material yield. But, the rest of that material has value where I come from, even though there was an additional cost to produce and move it. See why we can't use board footage scale around here in most instances? We do use board footage scale on hardwood logs and veneer, and some softwood log markets. Most softwood logs are scaled on m³, cords and tonnage. But anyone can understand that price is adjusted in those scales for what isn't used as lumber. You know very well it is. In these days, it's a matter of make or break a mill when average piece size decreases like it has in the north.

[Okrafarmer]

and convert to cords using figures for 8' wood, or 4 if there is a 4 foot pulp market.

SD, is there still a 4' market?  I haven't spent a winter in Maine for a while. When I was a kid we could watch the trains go by with thousands of cords of 4' pulp logs on them, and all the old oncelers were out beating the bush with their jitterbugs and pulp hooks to take 4' fir and other species to the paper mill. Do they still take 4' any more? I thought modern efficiency had finally done away with that.

[Buck]

Hey, thanks for all the great replies: I think I'm getting it but stop me if I'm wrong- trees are round, boards are flat... or am I getting close yet?

Lj

Pie are round and cornbread are square.  Hah! food for thought.

[SwampDonkey]

Yip, there are.

KATAHDIN PAPER COMPANY - East Millinocket, Maine

VERSO PAPERS - BUCKSPORT, Maine

FRASER PAPER - Edmundston, NB

Not long ago we had a hardwood veneer market for 4' maple and birch.

As a further for instance: You guys have firewood guys working for beer money, well same thing always went on at some mills, 4' pulp for beer money. Yup pickup loads at a time.

[Okrafarmer]

Yip, there are.

KATAHDIN PAPER COMPANY - East Millinocket, Maine

VERSO PAPERS - BUCKSPORT, Maine

FRASER PAPER - Edmundston, NB

Not long ago we had a hardwood veneer market for 4' maple and birch.

As a further for instance: You guys have firewood guys working for beer money, well same thing always went on at some mills, 4' pulp for beer money. Yup pickup loads at a time.

Whoa. I'm amazed the mills still put up with it in this day and age, where a tractor trailer of logs can be loaded and unloaded so much more efficiently. Around here I've never seen 4' logs for any reason unless it was firewood and even then that's random lengths that happen to sometimes be near 4'. Firewood is also a much more casual commodity in the south than it is in the north. Even people who heat exclusively with firewood rarely need more than 2 cords a winter down here, unless they burn pine-- which some of them do.

[Gary_C]

Donk, it's just the end of September and you are digging up threads that are two and a half years old and reopening them?

It's going to be a long winter by this measure. 

 

[g_man]

A cord of wood in these parts is a stack of wood 4x4x8.  Green 4' logs.  When you cut that stack of logs up into cut and split pieces, it reduces to a stack approx. 100 cu.ft.  Is this true, anyone out there.    Enchanted Forester

That is they way it works where I live in VT

[SwampDonkey]

We call 100 ft³ of solid wood a cunit. But that firewood isn't solid obviously. The cunit was used when purchasing by the cord, and converting to wood substance. It was a quick way to convert from a slick scale on the truck. One saw mill still buys on cunits near here the last I heard. The price was better than Irving, but never as good as Fraser's. My intuition tells me it wasn't 100 ft³ after all. It's like Ron says, no matter what scale you sell on the price is adjusted.

Gary, I'm not ready to hang my saw up yet for the year.

[chucker]

550 mbf for a band saw... circle saw 500 mbf is the going figure for a cord of 8" small end 100" sticks to a cord that is 4x4x8 = 128 cf! a cord of blocked wood cut to 16" lengths will produce a total of 120 cf!  a cord of blocked/split an stacked  will produce a total of  measuring out at 4'x16"x22.5 feet in length..... according to the grass routes  wood cutter pamplet handed out at out local fuel assistance office. as can be seen from their figures there is about a 8 cf. loss from sawing each 16" block from an 8' length/cord equaling a 120cf cord of sawed wood... thrown randomly into a conveyance for delivery it would total a sum of 160 cf.... which is a standard for sales here in centeral minnesota....

[Okrafarmer]

convance = conveyance?

[chucker]

   "THANKS"  excuse the dumb fingers hey?