Big J

Thanks for taking the time to reply in such detail. Very informative. I'm much too tired to say anything meaningful by way of response but just wanted to acknowledge your post.

About £60 a tonne, for reference.

I'm not posting to troll, but I'm trying to figure out when your fuel is so very much more expensive than forecourt petrol. So £0.58 of every litre of petrol goes to the exchequer in the form of fuel duty. Then there is also 20% VAT which is charged on the base cost and the duty. The base cost of a litre of petrol is around £0.50. The VAT takes it up to about £1.30. Now a quality 2 stroke oil (like Husqvara XP) is about £10.80/l, so £1.08 per 100ml of oil, and working out at around £0.22 per litre. So couple that with a base cost of £0.50 for the petrol, you have a cost price, before tax of £0.72 per litre. The cheapest I can find aspen for is about £2.90 per litre plus VAT, and I'd have to spend almost a thousand pounds up front for 270 litres. I'm not sure what the legality of storing that is either. £0.58 of that is duty, so that means production cost is £2.32, which makes is almost 4 times as expensive before any tax than standard fuel. Assuming a production cutter is using 7 litres a day, 35 litres a week for about 45 weeks a year, they'd spend around £2500 on normal petrol and over £4500 on Aspen. More frustrating is the disparity in terms of what you're actually charging for it before taxes, where it's 4 times as expensive. I appreciate that there are extra costs with (relatively) low volume production, packaging and producing a healthier fuel, but how do you justify the 4 fold price hike? Genuinely interested, not trolling.

Canker, I believe, though I've never seen it as extensively as that.

Horsey types like it to go underneath straw to soak up the wizz. In the end, we just bunged it all into a biomass skip, along with everything else that would burn.

It depends an awful lot as to whether it's coast or giant. Also, on the individual form of the trees. For instance, when running the mill, I'd never pay for giant redwood. I'd just pay to uplift it from site, which given that the stems were often 4-6t, was a fair deal. Being open grown with the possibility of metal also didn't help. In contrast, I'm driving past an incredible little stand of well-thinned coast redwood on my way to site at the moment. Trees are maybe 60cm at chest height, 35-38m tall. No branching, no fluting, no chance of metal. I'd have paid as much as £100/t for it roadside if I had a job for it (maybe more) as I know it would produce stunning, and largely unique cladding.

I don't, but Steve said his son was going to take some and email them to me. I'll chase him up.

I think it's just a case of people generally choosing elm if they want character and oak if they want something plainer. Sycamore never seemed to be fashionable in the 7 years I properly ran a sawmill.

Not sure if it's a 48, but Steve at Helmdon sawmills has a big lump of a Stenner he's selling. Twin heads, log deck on, board handling off, computer controlled. About £30k.

I'm glad that you've got a market for it, but with the profusion of elm that was the case in Scotland until very recently, very few people would look at it. Customers would generally either want elm or oak. Sometimes ash, and occasionally sycamore, but not enough to warrant much effort in sourcing it.

When on softwood cutting, my cutters are doing 40 litres a week. Even processing blown hardwoods with winching it's 20 litres a week. I understand the appeal of Aspen for the occasional user who doesn't want it to go off, but it's a luxury for most full-time professionals.

Very strong smell from rowan though? Can't abide by it personally.

I suppose I ought to add myself. Bulk hardwood and softwood supply. Mainly softwood now though. I run a forestry harvesting outfit, but have good contacts with sawmills around the country and can arrange for timber we've felled to be cut to specification. Wholesale only.

From the bark, I would have been 100% sure it's hornbeam, but the dark heart isn't something we saw much of when we did 80-100t of the stuff in January. That being said, the odd tree had it. Also, the grain looks rather coarse, which suggests it isn't hornbeam. I assume it's stupidly heavy? Try popping a lump in a bucket of water to see if it sinks.

What happened to the rest of the tree?

I was lucky to do about a dozen of them. £35-50 a hoppus was pretty standard, but I didn't really ever see a perfect burr.

I think Matty is referring to sawn timber. Scotts would be roundwood. There are still several very large elm burrs I felled a few years back in their yard. The market collapsed and these butts are going to waste. Such a shame.

Squaredy (Gavin at Wentwood Timber) buys wholesale

It's interesting reading your discussions of historic prices for British hardwoods. The prices have not kept up with inflation at all. Last I heard was good sycamore planking was doing £5-6/hf which is only a 100% price increase on over 300% inflation. The more I've done with timber, the more I've come to appreciate softwoods if I'm honest. You get the full spectrum of colour, figure and qualities in a tree that grows faster, more consistently and is much easier to harvest. Then couple that with the fact that it's much easier to dry, and for me personally, it's hard to find a case for hardwood, at least on a commercial basis.

I didn't ever deal with export, only local and sometimes national markets. When you could buy perfect vacuum kilned stock at £14/cf if just never made sense to mill it myself.

Most of my knowledge as regards sycamore comes from a now retired timber buyer/grader called Gavin Munro. He bought and sold thousands of tonnes of the stuff back when it was fashionable. It's out of fashion now so practically worthless. The end rearing is a solution to the issue of sap staining for smaller mills. Larger mills all vacuum kilned it, as far as I'm aware. That's one of the reasons it's often very cheap; because the production process is so quick. Boring timber though, unless rippled or highly figured.

Sycamore needs to be felled at the right time of year (ie, before the sap starts to rise). In Scotland, that would be January up until about mid February. It then needs to be milled as soon as possible after felling, as the grey staining from the crosscut very quickly starts to devalue the stem. It's just unattractive. As regards drying, there are two ways to do it. Either end rear for 4-6 weeks and then put into stack, or stick straight into a vacuum kiln. Some of the large producers of sycamore in the UK use vacuum kilns as it allows them to rapidly dry the timber without all the tedious end rearing. Or if you are producing character grade timber, a bit of grey staining and sticker marking isn't the end of the world. From personal experience, I could just about get away with kiln drying it from green in a conventional vented set up, but you would still get some staining. I have straight stacked fresh sawn sycamore, and staining is also inevitable. I never found that there was a big demand for sycamore though, so it's not something I cut too much of.

It's been a pleasure to help get you started. I've been on the tractor mostly for the past couple of months but have a stint on the forwarder coming up next week. Looking forward to it too

I agree with this, but £4.50-5.00 would be my price roadside on it. The spiral grain, basal decay and branches devalue what is otherwise a stem with good form. The potential for metal work is also an issue.

Oversized, not straight, branches in places. A real mix. Everything you'd expect from old hardwoods.