Mobile Sawmill- a good business to start?

[timbernut]

I know 6 sawyer a within 6 miles of me in south Norfolk (3 mobile 3 stationary) and I don't think any of them do it full time!

[youcallthatbig]

I think you will find John, that "full time" is a "subjective view", in twenty years of doing mobile milling, my customer base has probably shrunk, but yet I have never been as busy,I certainly was not full time when I initially bought the mill.

 

There are more "non commercial" mobile mills working now, which I think probably helps accounts for my reduced one off days out, (aligned to CBA moments that comes with age and experience)

But I have a regular client base that has taken years to form.

Would I start out on this again, knowing what I do now, probably, but then I love what I do,

Would I buy a small mill to do it commercially, not a snowballs chance in hell.....

Buy big and buy strong, and that will cost you, because even if you don't bend it, one of your clients almost certainly will by accident when helpfully loading you.

Good luck if you do it, you will meet some great like minded folk, and also some complete tw*ts!

[wills-mill]

All good ideas. It'a a bit different here in the SE, not so many smaller mills or people with the farming tackle to take butts to a static mill. And no doubt more income sloshing about and people who want to carry out projects with decorative rather than purely functional timber.

 

Even full-time sawing is not full time- I faced the same sort of problems as skc101fc and now try to make a balance of less mobile milling, and more production and supply of timber. Access, log quality, size, presentation and handling, site layout- can all make a massive difference to output. There is a real challenge to creating a fully workable cutting list from timber that is often limited in quantity, may be marginal quality and tight on sizes.

 

There's a bit of a learning curve. For starters, you need to know about who is going to be handling the timbers that you create. It's often not the customer, so you have to know what a timber framer, landscaper, builder will be expecting to pull out of a stack.