Squaredy

I meant to reply to this a few days ago but I've been rather tied up. I would say you are wasting your time trying to sell to joiners. They want to make doors, windows, conservatories, shop fittings etc and are very well served by the imported timber industry. They can get top quality square edged Idigbo, Iroko, and others and you will be struggling to compete with that on quality or price or size range. It is quite difficult to judge who your customers will be and my experience is they vary a lot, but I almost never sell to joiners - they just don't want UK timber - it is way too characterful for them. High quality bespoke kitchen manufacturers might be a possibility, but again you will be competing with lots of high quality relatively cheap imported timber like American Cherry, Walnut etc. Not trying to be negative, but finding your customers could be quite a challenge. Maybe don't pre-judge, just start advertising what you have and see who wants it. Your customers might turn out to be people you never even thought of.

I do agree that it is all very arbitrary sadly. I heard a pub owner talking on the radio a day or two ago (Radio 5) who is going to miss out on these grants because his rateable value is £1 over the threshold. If your rateable value (for leisure hospitality and retail) in England is between £15000 and £50,999 you get a grant of £25,000. His rateable value was £51,000 so he gets nothing. He said he had a thriving pub business and now he has no idea if he can keep his head above water until he is allowed to re-open. And let's be honest pubs will not be able to open fully for a while. Maybe not even properly until next summer. We have it easy compared to them, at least tree work can largely carry on with social distancing in place.

Yeah comparing trees is a bit crazy! I have never chipped London Plane, love the timber though. Lime timber is lovely for carving mind. Wonder what round two will hold. Yew versus Sequoia? Juniper versus Cedar of Lebanon?

Good question, not sure anyone knows, just a feature of the tree.

The theory of a low tax society is not actually that people will have more money, because they will be spending that money on the things the government would have provided. What it should do is give people more choice. For instance rather than everyone pay loads of tax and then send their kids to the local state school, pay less tax and then choose which private school to send their kids to. We have all got so used to paying loads of tax and assuming that the state provides everything we forget that their may be other ways of providing vital services. We don't buy our food from the government after all....!

Actually not true. This country built a huge railway network and an extensive health service without tax. Both were nationalised in the forties.

Common Lime is one of the few common trees that it is really justified to dislike. Just like the London Plane it is a hybrid but unlike the London Plane it has few redeeming features. Ever tried growing anything under a Common Lime? Or parking a car under a Common Lime? Or wondered why it is that it produces such a forest of shoots from its base all the time and no matter how often you prune them they come back faster than ever. Small Leave Lime and Large Leave lime are lovely trees, Common Lime is a bad mistake, and the fact it has been planted in so many cities is testament to the ignorance of the planners. London Plane may not be quite so good for insects such as bees, but it is surely our cities' most majestic tree by a country mile, and so well adapted to life in polluted cities. Open and shut case in my opinion....

If it is Alder or Poplar it is not really suitable for using the spoon. If you want to make spoons etc for use in kitchen you really need Beech or Sycamore.

No the grant is not repayable but if he succeeded in getting it he might eventually end up paying business rates, which could eventually end up costing more than the grant in the first place! Whereas currently he is paying no business rates.

If you can persuade them to charge you business rates remember you may pay for it in the long run as perhaps the small business rates relief will be reduced or abolished in the future to repay the grants. Be careful what you wish for!

It is not about cheap labour it is simply about getting the job done . Pay can actually be quite good and is at least min wage.

Well done Saul that would have been such a waste to go for firewood.

Well Saul Enjoy.

I don't recall this being a thread about youth. It is about the lack of ethic of hard physical labour in the UK. Realistically it is the youth who you would expect to want to go for hard manual jobs most, because they are likely to be able to cope with the demands of the job better, but the point is we have had apparently one million extra people claim universal credit in the last month, and yet thousands of farms are in crisis because they cannot get good workers. It is a fair point that something does not add up!

Some nice sticks there. Surely not all for chainsaw milling....?

This kiln dehumidifier is designed simply for kilning timber that is already air dried. It is not intended for fully kilning freshly split logs. I used to use my diesel powered kiln which can dry around 24 cubic metres split logs at a time. It uses around 600 litres of red diesel to fire it for 5 or 6 days. This will just about dry split logs if they are already partly dried. That is the equivalent to around £1000 worth of electricity. I no longer use my kiln for drying firewood, because it is too time consuming and expensive and takes up loads of indoor space.

Yes Big J has it spot on. What you have proposed is in fact a bit like a farmer saying he is going to build a bakery as he has calculated he can sell his wheat for a much better price if he mills it and turns it into bread. It is very easy to overlook the amount of time space and energy it will use to chop, split, dry, and store 21 lorry loads of logs. Also of course you then have to start marketing your end product and delivering it to hundreds of customers.

I was only messing Mark, milling looks good it is not easy to see on a sideways blurry pic though!

I preferred the original.....

I can’t claim any direct experience of this but let’s be honest if you think back to school and career aspirations when you were growing up, everything is about getting a well paid non physical job. I do not know anyone who does a physically demanding job for eight or ten hours a day and is happy with it. As a stop gap maybe but nothing else. Some countries out there youngsters are just grateful to be safe and in work, and earning several times what they would in their home country. I think it is just a symptom of a highly developed society like the UK - no one aspires to hard physical labour.

Well you might find someone down your way who will buy wholesale. You can always advertise to individuals and you could find some regular purchasers, but as Mr RoughHewn said it can be a very long term process finding those customers. And of course even when they do come along they often will want something you do not quite have! I currently have around 100 tons of milled timber dry and drying, and yet I have only half the selection I would like. Good luck whatever you do and let us have some pics - Elm if often very beautiful timber.

I might buy your stock at wholesale prices.....if you are not too far from Monmouthshire.

Got any pics?

Thanks for the photos. Even if those vents are all open it is nowhere near enough ventilation for drying fresh cut logs. To finish drying part dried logs may be OK. If you fill that shed with fresh logs the roof will drip with condensation after a cold night. Having said that if it is a spud store it should be well insulated. Great looking shed though, just seems a shame you can't get some space next to it to do the outdoor drying.

I think you need to buy a hygrometer and see how moist the air is in the building. In this weather it is around 40% to 50% outdoors, I am guessing your building could be in the nineties. You did not mention what your main business is - I am assuming not firewood? Whatever it is have you thought about the implications of all the moisture you are releasing into the air? It will cause tools to rust, paper to get musty and all sorts of problems with electrical items if there really is no ventilation. It sounds to me like you have a totally unsuitable situation for drying logs. Each loose cubic metre of fresh sawn logs will release about 200 litres of water into the air, or if the air is already saturated it will just go mouldy and rot. I think the other arbtalkers are being helpful but too gentle - unless there is good continuous ventilation your wood will not dry. Photos might help with advising you.