oak thinning

[toby]

Coppice is a funny one, some times landowners want silly cash, some times they're just happy to have it kept in rotation and sometimes they pay me to cut it. It doesnt always corespond to quality.

[wills-mill]

it inflates the prices temporarily but they will return to a normal level.

 

the closing of the coal mines left a void in the poor quality hardwood market as mining timber was not needed. Then sawmills started producing finger jointed boards and glulam from ever smaller trees.

 

 

It's interesting now that the high tech softwood only mills want timber to a very tight spec, so there seems to be a lot of oversized timber in small quantities that they physically can't process (even though they wouldn't want to).

 

I think that's the sort of situations most people on this board will face- having a relatively small bunch of an 'odd' species of timber. Very time consuming to deal with- you really need to find an end product or an end user and then work out where and how they get their timber.....

 

 

 

W

Edited January 2, 2009 by wills-mill

[Log-ologist]

There are still numbers of small mills that will take oversized timber. East Brothers near Salisbury are one. There also was a place in devon that took 40' logs of Douggie, I felled quite a few trees last century that went there .

 

Now if you can its worth finding a local mobile sawmill to do the work and you sell the product.

 

Also keep in touch with them as they are often looking for certain types of tree, you may have just the thing available in the comming weeks.

Edited January 2, 2009 by Log-ologist

[wills-mill]

There are still numbers of small mills that will take oversized timber. East Brothers near Salisbury are one. There also was a place in devon that took 40' logs of Douggie, I felled quite a few trees last century that went there .

 

Now if you can its worth finding a local mobile sawmill to do the work and you sell the product.

 

Also keep in touch with them as they are often looking for certain types of tree, you may have just the thing available in the comming weeks.

 

The smaller mills tend to be the ones that were set up to take big individual butts cut to different specs with a sawyer's eye and experience, and the big mills are there to blast through almost identical softwood product with decisions taken by the milliecond by computer. Both are impressive!

 

Speaking as a local mobile sawmill that's the kind of wise advice that should be spread about a bit more

 

We manage to get through 5 and 6ft butts after quartering them up with a big saw and a ripping chain.

[josharb87]

what sort of product did you make out of those pics?

[wills-mill]

All in quite different situations:

 

Pic 1- The guy doing the ripping had done the treework for the timber and has been a very good mate to me over the years. Sadly the tree had been topped and messed about with over the years, and was in a bad way. I helped him out with the milling in return for a percentage of the timber. With the treework+milling +handling +transport +stacking he's out of pocket but the timber was magnificent, as good as you could hope for in a relatively domestic tree. (End product: planking for joinery and some big chunky slabs and lumps for coffee tables, benches etc)

 

Pic 2- That's me in the helmet, the saw's mounted on a Logosol 'Big Mill' rail system. This was a job for a customer who had had a huge oak very close to the house felled. He wanted to floor a big sitting room in the house, we cut out enough timber to do the whole of the downstairs of there very large house. A very satisfying job (few more pics below, including an old file that had been banged into the tree ) (End rpoduct: flooring and posts and beams for a complete garden building)

 

Pic 3- A very large London Plane in a square in Knightsbridge, W London. Pretty serious white and brown rots in the base, had to come out.... Was asked in to do the milling by the firm that was doing the takedown. At the end of the milling, the boss man reckoned we'd saved him money over standing there ringing it up, as well a saving of about 2 Transit loads of sawdust and sweepings, AND he's got a lovely collection of Lacewood boards tucked away for a rainy day. (End product: planking for joinery and flooring, chunks for bowl blanks and turning)

 

The mechanics of it are quite simple compared to chainsaw cutting- 45hp of Kubota diesel driving a bandsaw blade about 2mm thick vs about 8hp of chainsaw driving a chain that's nibbling out about 8 to 10mm waste!

At the end of the day I reckon the Woodmizer's got through less fuel as well

Edited January 2, 2009 by wills-mill

[wills-mill]

Apologies for de-railing the thread!

[David oakman]

No i loved seeing your pictures i love to see trees with an end use it makes me feel good when trees are not wasted:001_smile:

[shabz1978]

i was thinking of buying one of those logosol mills, probably an m7? are they complicated to use? i wouldn't have a clue about them so would be starting from scratch.

 

 

sorry to hi-jack your thread, didn't think it worth starting a new one.