Small sawmill?

[Woodhauler]

Now there is a poor market for low grade pine in maine, do you think a guy could make money sawing it into boards? Seems there was a sawmill in every couple of towns growing up and they seemed to make money.

[thecfarm]

Yes,there was more sawmills. That was before people got sue crazy too. Now lumber needs to be stamped by a grader to build a house with. Yes,out buldings are OK,but not a house. Most don't want to wait for lumber either. Most want to go to a lumber yard and buy what they want. Not wait a week or two to have it sawed out. Some don't have the smarts to realize that a 3 inch knot in a 2X4 should not be used or they just don't care and try to build it cheap and sell it high and than when the building fails in 5 years someone has to take the blame.

[Magicman]

poor market for low grade pine

I am wondering how "low grade pine" will make high grade lumber.   ???

[Woodhauler]

poor market for low grade pine

I am wondering how "low grade pine" will make high grade lumber.   ???

Its hard to imagine , but people up here will buy knotty pine to build with! I never said it would make high grade lumber did I? My office walls and living room celian is done in knotty pine.

[Magicman]

 :D  :D  Indeed you are correct, and that is the fun of sawing.  Making something out of nothing, name it character, and get $300 for it.   ;)

[WDH]

I would say yes.  I do it, but I am not in Maine where most people are froze. 

[POSTON WIDEHEAD]

but I am not in Maine where most people are froze.

:D :D :D

[4x4American]

 :D :D :D  WDH

[repmma]

Seems like it is hard to compete with the $0.29 per linear ft 6" kiln dried, camp grade tongue and groove on craigslist.  Plain old boarding in or siding at $0.50/bdft seems reasonable but if your paying $250/mbf for logs it's not leaving you much over normal milling rate.

Not to say I don't want to offer milled lumber off my land to subsidize my dubing around!  If it's your logs it's at least a market for the logs that may be hard to get rid of right now.

I'm cutting up popple for boards.  What other option is there!?  More value to me as lumber even if the top half of it is left in the woods.

[longtime lurker]

There's no market for logs because the pulp guys are pulling out correct?

yanno... I believe that if the small mills all disappeared years ago and you don't have to compete with the pulp mills for logs there might be an opening there. Reliable log supply is about a third of the problems mills face, the others being staffing and marketing.

You'd need to find some tentative markets suitable for the product mix you'd likely get.

Then think hard about the gear. You want modern, fast and manpower efficient. Don't get caught in the trap of so many small mills... They save $ on the payments of good equipment and spend it on wages and resultant high cost per unit of production instead. Log recovery efficiency doesn't matter much in low grade logs... It's cheaper to buy more logs then maintain bands so go with circles... An end dogging scragg, gang saw and an optimized edger would be a start point.

One thing you need to think on is "where will I get the logs?" Stupid at first glance but what will happen with the pulp guys going is that the contractor base will go with it. That happened here years ago... Resource got locked up, mills closed down, harvest and transport contractors went too... And when we started up there was no one left to call and say "bring me a load of logs". I know you got a couple trucks... But better be thinking to run your own harvest in a few years too. One think that won't make money is a mill sitting idle for want of logs in the yard.

[red]

Fill the void. But by a Big Sawmill

[longtime lurker]

I was thinking about this today (because yanno... I can't spend all day in the mill fishing or thinking about food)

In 2011 we got nailed with Tropical Cyclone Yasi - Just like a normal hurricane but bigger - and about 30,000 acres of mature plantation (radiata pine mostly) under lease to HQ Plantations (a division of Hancock) got flattened. There was no possible way to process that kind of volume in a reasonable timeframe, so what ended up happening was it was salvaged, trucked to the nearest ports, chipped, and the chip was exported for pulping. I believe it went mostly to Japan and China.

Thing being that Maine has ports, right? And trees. And no pulp plants or sawmilling capacity sufficient to process those trees. And perhaps a government that might be a little supportive of anything that keeps some part of the industry afloat?

Maybe it might be worth looking at a chipper rather then a sawmill, keep the whole harvest and transport sectors built around the pulp plants going.