Big J

Looks good there David. Let's see how much metal we find in the log - it's sure to keep Andrew the woodmizer operator amused! Thanks for posting the photo - I'll follow it up with photos of it getting milled next Wednesday. Jonathan

We are milling a fairly large batch of good quality Elm from around 600 yards from the Palace of Holyrood in Edinburgh on the 17th of November. The logs are 16-18ft long, 20-28 inches in diameter, excellent colour, virtually no shake, pippy and burred in places. Can mill to order and deliver by pallet (£65 a pallet). Price is £18 to £22 a cubic foot (£637 to £778 a cubic meter) and can be cut to any thickness required. Get in touch if you are interested. There is about 240 cubic foot available. Jonathan

I did a week a couple of years ago as a complete novice, digging, planting, staking and tubing each sapling. Was up to just over 200 a day, but that was on fairly tough ground.

Got an ipad 1 on 24 month contract with 3 for £75 initially and £20 a month. It's damned useful for work, but does my nut in for all the things it won't do. Don't get me wrong, I wouldn't be without it, but I think that it could be done so much better. Perhaps it is with the ipad 2. Jonathan

A sawmill up in Fife I sometimes work with use their board drying kiln to dry firewood when it would otherwise be lying empty. Their kiln is heated by a furnace that is fed offcuts, and it heats their office as well. I think if you are using electricity to provide the heat, it would prove to be too expensive and unsustainable. Regarding moisture contents, I think you folk in the south have really benefited from a dry summer. My firewood (for my house only - don't sell.....yet) is dry, but only by virtue of the fact that it has been split, stacked and under cover for over a year. Using the ridiculously expensive Delmhost MC meter, the Elm was 15.9%, the Ash 20-21% and the Oak 20-23%. With our damp climate in Scotland, much drier than that is impossible without some form of artificial environment (poly tunnel, kiln etc). For instance, the weather forecast for this week is an average of roughly 13 degrees and 81% RH for the day. This equates to an equilibrium MC of 16%. Obviously it's much cooler and damper overnight. Contrast that with London, which is usually 20-30% points drier, you have a much shorter and less intense drying season.

Yep, you're definitely overweight there mate!

Facebook is like prison - you spend hours writing on walls and occasionally you get poked by someone you don't know.

4-4.5 tonne I would think.

Marvellous photos mate - a real credit to you!

If you run a browser such as Google Chrome, there is a built in spell check anyway. As a member of a number of forums with an international membership, it's somewhat embarrassing that often those for whom English isn't a first language speak/write it better than us natives! If folk are going to make the effort to post in a foreign language, the least we can do is make an effort with our mother tongue.

Seems excessive to me. As long as the firewood is of good quality, as dry as can reasonably be expected (quite different according to region - try getting all your logs to 21% MC in Scotland after the washout summer we've had) and without rot, you are selling a good product. Whether or not it's branchwood is immaterial. Firewood sales seem to be built predominantly on reputation - such accreditation would be a waste of money for most suppliers. Jonathan

May I make an addition Tommer? Spell Check | Online Spellchecker Now nobody has an excuse!

Update: The Navara is with the garage until next Wednesday. I asked for a van replacement for the time being as transporting timber is more important than 4x4 capability at the moment (they couldn't offer me a tow bar). They did however give me a fairy small van, which isn't a great deal of use. On the plus side, they very quickly agreed to put it through it's first service for free.

No never. If anything, I think they are more dangerous than a good modern pair of grippy rubber gloves. They are slippery in the wet, hard and brittle once they've dried out, utterly unnecessary, and 5 times the price of a good rubber and textile glove. Jonathan

The sycamore that I cut that was similar was a stunted little troll of a tree - very old, but not more than about 35ft tall, with a bark that was fissured and ugly. Amazing inside though - it was cut into monster turning blanks: Jonathan

Very poor indeed. I must say that most of the staff are pretty pleasant, but there is one rude older chap who seems to be most put out each time we are there. I've had a number of heated exchanges with him resulting in me simply requesting to speak to someone else. I do crave a new 'old' truck. Can anyone do me a pristine, 3000 miles on the clock 1997 Hilux?

Update: The lease company have been speaking directly to Nissan UK, and Nissan want to offer me a Navara for the duration of the repair, but without any towing capacity. I have a lot of deliveries going out at present, so that's mostly useless, but it's a start. I'll see if they can just fire a van over to me for the time being, as 4x4 capacity isn't too crucial at the moment, whereas load carrying is. Jonathan

I'm not permitted to clean shave. My wife says I look 12. I'm inclined to agree with her, plus I think people take sawmillers more seriously when they have the capacity to hold a significant amount of sawdust in facial storage!

Good ideas, all of them. Especially like the sleepers idea Tom - some quite large garden centres locally that might go for them. Squared beams like sleepers produce a lot of firewood off cuts anyway. Jonathan

Update: Into the garage again this morning (visit #7). There is nothing that they can do anymore without taking it for a week or two. They can't offer me any courtesy car at all this week, and even when they can, it won't be a 4x4, and even then, it has to come back spotless. Utterly useless given what it's needed for. So spoke to the lease company and they are going to try to sort out a replacement for the duration of the (I'm hopeful, the final) repair. If they don't, I'm going to cancel the lease. What a bloody palava!

We've cut well over a thousand tonnes of hardwood cord in the last year and a bit. Seeing as processors are the only quick way to convert firewood, I wouldn't want to put a good deal of what we've cut through a processor. Too bendy and knotty. If you weren't to process it though, it would just be wasted. 500 cubic metres is some number though. You would need to shift that though to turn a £15000 gross profit, which isn't much at the end of the day. You then have capital costs like a processor, a delivery method, vented bags. How the hell do you firewood merchants make any money?!

Very useful replies - thanks everyone! As it stands, I don't sell any firewood, but can only see it as an industry that will continue to grow. The margins are small though, and that is what puts me off. I would have to be very careful not to tread on the toes of the estate that I will rent the yard from. Jonathan

We are moving to a new and larger yard to allow us to expand with the sawmilling business and part of that is that we want to commit to being onsite at least a couple of days a week. In order to fill that time whilst there aren't customers there, we need to do something. If we were milling for all that time, I think that we would produce far more sawn timber than we could realistically sell at this point. However, if we were to sell firewood, it could be a viable use of our time. We have good local access to stands of good quality (and fairly large) Sitka, Larch and Douglas which we can fell and extract ourselves, probably getting it to our yard for £25 a tonne. Would you bother? All the local estates only sell hardwood. Most of the local tree surgeons sell mixed loads. I'm pretty sure that it would sell quite well for about £50 a cubic metre (two cube to the tonne, so £12.50 cost, plus my time and a bit of petrol for conversion). We would need at least a couple of hundred cubic metres to make it worth while, which isn't an issue for storage (could probably stack and store 3-400 cube). I know that in various parts of the country softwood sells well, and in others it's impossible to convince the customer of it's value. Jonathan

Nice mill - not sure what it is though. Lovely piece of sycamore there too. I've only once had sycamore like that, with the dark and colourful heart. Also nice to see a mobile miller demonstrating with hardwood - most up here just run douglas fir on demo days.

That's marvellous Darren - very kind of you. He just uses his stove for general heating and isn't fussed what goes into it. I'll just have to dig out his address and I'll PM it, along with phone numbers to you. Thanks again - Jonathan