picked up 1000 bd ft of 1″ maple 8′ lengths in 4, 6, 8, 10 & 12″ widths all furniture grade ( no knots visible ) for $ 1.20 bd ft ( about $1 US ) 8% mc air dried 2 yrs
sawyer has 500 bd ft of what he calls quilted birch im curious as to its value compared to the maple i bought anyone have a rough idea seeing as he dident quote a price & i might be interested in picking it up for future use
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specialty woods are worth whatever someone is willing to pay. I bought some fiddleback maple (about 1000 bd.ft.) for 10 cents a bd.ft. when the previous buyer backed out and the sawyer couldn't find another one and the wood turned grey and even started to spalt on a few boards..
On the other hand I've seen fiddleback maple sell for $400 for enough wood to make a violin. Quilted birch would be unique and if I were able to buy it I might offer a couple dollars a bd.ft. but then I'm a noted cheapskate..
the guy must have been desperate.
I wood BURN wood before selling it for 10 cents a BF.
I just saw a set of draws done in reddish pink/beige birch with a medium but consistent figure. the cabinet maker said he bought it in New Hampshire and paid just under 9.00 a board ft. delivered. it was part of a lager order.It was 4/4 rough x 6-8inches wide and 12 feet long. I would have to assume it was from the same tree.It was a very nice piece. It's going into a church in town.Ron
Edited 3/26/2009 5:21 pm ET by Ron01960
i made a mistake on my maple buy i discovered m when sawyer was talking to me he claimed there was around 1200 bd ft but i figured there was probably a thousand
turns out he was correct & i had gave him $ 1200 cdn so it ended up costing me about 75 cents a bd ft US
started milling it up and havent found a bad board yet
bought a 1000 bd ft of black cherry from same sawyer 2 years ago & it all came from 2 30" trees & not a bad board in the lot up to 12" wide boards
He has a shredder and it makes mulch from ends and waste wood, 1000 bd.ft. won't make 2 pick up trucks full of mulch and the going price was $20.00 a pickup load. So my $100.00 was better than the $40.00 he'd get for mulch..
Wood isn't all that expensive if you know where to buy it.. the going price for hardwood sold to pallet mills is $.15-.17 bd.ft. so a dime for wood that has turned grey isn't all that cheap!
pallet wood at my sawyer is crap wood & one step higher than firewood
furniture grade is from tree up to first branch he told me
here you can get $ 200 a face cord for split & dried hard wood
this sawyer sells all kinds of wood from his 500 acres and due to the density of the bush the lower branches are up a decent distance which generates more decent wood
he has sold to the odd US trucker in tractor trailer lots & he is a cash only man US or CDN
Well actual pallet wood to meet GMA specs call for pretty decent wood.. Granted it's not all FAS quality but that's also where wood with character winds up.. However even lower grade wood can have some pieces which are all clear straight grain..
I personally hate to see people buy perfect boards and pay silly prices for them only to cut them into much shorter, smaller pieces.
If I spend $100 and buy mill run wood (which pallet wood is) I'm sure to get a few FAS pieces in the lot. But I can get enough wood to make a complete furniture set. If I wanted it could all be straight grained too!
(boring, no art to that at all)
In my case I built a whole house with that wood!
Walk through it sometime! Ever see tiger stripe black walnut? I've got 19 foot long 12 inch wide boards of it! My timbers (it's a double timberframe) include 19 timbers of all burl.. yeh like burl you find in wafer thin sheets to be carefully glued onto straight grain wood to look interesting.. (or they put on the dashboard of fine automobles like Rolls Royce and Jaguar) Some of the burl boards are 22 inches wide and 10 feet long! all burl!
Fiddle back white oak and birds eye red oak..
all of it,, over 50,000 bd.ft. I paid only $25,000 for..
My point is that too many people equate FAS wood as a good thing.. To me it's simply boring and I'd rather not have it! Oh I'll use it but give me wood with interesting character and wild figure and I am happy as a clam.. The joy of finding the exact correct spot for that particular piece of wood is what changes wood working into art with wood!
Whats the cost of a private contractor sawing logs in your area with a wood mizer?
My guess is NO ONE charges less than 15 cents PBF.My area - its 20 cents.I would burn the wood first before selling for 10 cents pbf.As for my raw wood costs - 20 cents per board foot.
I cut almost all of my own logs.
have A pallet factory not far away and the cuttings are free so i get it for fire wood & as a result my oak , cherry , maple etc fire wood for free so i do get to see the material they use for firewood & i even toured one of their suppliars mills and saw the grading etc
picked up 500 ft of quilted birch 4/4 not " slims " today for less than a $ US a bd ft & no his wife dosent have cancer & he dosent need the money & he is switching to maple syrup production and needs the space
Probably more than 20 cents. a bd. ft. I don't know. I know very few woodmizer operators.. but what you fail to understand is that small production sawmills are simply production places.. few have any real space for excess inventory storage and none indoors where wood won't be further damaged by weather.
Degraded wood is worth nothing because not even pallet mills want wood that has turned grey. Thus it is normally tossed into the shredder and turned into mulch.. That has an added cost and well, I'm sure they get a whole lot less than 10 cents a bd.ft. for much.
The mill I buy from saws only around 1-2 million bd.ft. a year and once ten thousand bd.ft. or so are stacked up someone needs to come and buy it or things get real crowded real FAST..
I sold equipment to mills that saw many, many times that amount and they have systems in place to ensure that no wood goes to waste. Smaller mills that sell a variety of hardwoods don't have such fall back options and often sell wood for later delivery to someone and when that person fails to pick up the wood it sits around and degrades..
interesting
where you at?
seems like some of those mills should invest in a little MORE room
Most logging operations tend to be pretty much done on the cheap.. a lot of older mills get recycled into new operations and they use whatever cheap land is available and they have both access to and a source of three phase power close by..
Sawmills rarely are permanent.. trees harvested can make the cost of transporting logs unprofitable.
Cash flow is king.. they buy trees before they have buyers for that wood based on their best guestimate of what will happen to wood pricing.. and won't get paid untill 30-60 days after delivery in many cases.
I saw the sawmill lose tens of thousands of dollars on basswood and gain it back on red oak.. a year earlier basswood had been their most profitable wood to buy/sell.
They make/lose money when prices go up or down and that doesn't follow that falling prices cost them money or make them money.. it depends on too many other factors.. such as inventories and what price they bought the timbers at..
Storing wood is not good for a sawmill. Remember cashflow is king.. To tie up tens of thousands of dollars in unsold inventoried wood will cost them too much in interest costs.. Not to mention wood degradation..
Maple for example stains real easily and maple only a few months old cannot be sold due to that staining.. Some of that deterioration could be reduced if they had covered storage faciities, however that cost them in many ways..
First the space for such facilities reduces space available for raw materials inventory, then there is the actual cost of construction and finally there is insurance.. Banks will not lend money unsecurred.. one requirement is insurance and the number of buildings adds dramatically to the cost of that insurance.. that additional cost adds to all wood even that wood flowing through the facility without any need for storage..
Insurance companies aren't the bad guys they seem either.. fire is extremely common in sawmills..
The sawmill I buy my wood from is a 3rd generation sawmill.. the first generation comes to work every single day and puts in an amount of work that would stun a man 1/3 his age.. This is a man who early in his 20's had a 2x4 go completely through his body. Well into his 70's he needs to put in 12 hour days just to stay ahead of the bank.. His son runs the company day to day and is a pretty shrewd trader. He leaves very little on the table when dealing with buyers.. To get the standing timbers he has to bid against other buyers and while many farmers will only trust his company when selling their woodlots, the prices he pays have to be competitive with other mills in order to retain that loyalty..
That means that sometimes he pays for wood that he cannot possible sell at a profit. On the other hand sometimes the market gods fall right in hand and the logs come in better than appraised. Clues in the bark that determine grading of the standing log may be false leads and yield a FAS grade wood when nothing more that 3 BorC was anticipated.
Frenchy : ever see the bark on a birds eye maple tree
my sawyer showed me a piece the other day , very unique
my sawyer has now decided to go into maple syrup as he is 67 and getting tired of the lumber business
hes gonna start with 200 trees piped to a sugar shack lower on the hillside behind his home ( hes got 500 acres to play with )
he feels the sawing business is to labour intensive & too idiot saturated when you need hired help he claims !
AS for your mill i dont know how they stay in business with the prices you are paying
I wish I could have taken a picture of the giant that yielded me my burls.. White oak with the truck so large it wouldn't fit on the carriage. (more than 5 feet across, all burl!). There were tens of thousands of little twiglets sticking out of the bark on every piece from that tree. They'd made a few passes with the saw and tossed it into the discard pile as not being worth sawing.. That's where I found it.. 4 massive logs each 10 feet long or longer all burl!
I made 9 6x6 posts out of it and 123 bd.ft. of planks 22 inches wide and 10+ feet long..
I was so thrilled with my purchase I paid him 40 cents a bd. ft.
I take advantage of a volume producer (1-2 million bd.ft. a year).. that means he'll have several hundred thousand bd.ft. just sitting in his yard waiting to be sawn.. 95% (or more) of what he sells is at wholesale prices. His biggest buyers are pallet mills and railroads.. (going price for a hardwood railroad tie is $20. that's for a 9"x 7" x 8 1/2'
While he does sell off the graded stuff he pays 10 cents a bd.ft. for grading. So often he will simply saw for yield and sell the whole lot at mill run prices.. That's where the real bargains are to be found.. Mill run averages something like 20% FAS and only about 5% is low grade stuff. He's more than fair about it because if a board won't grade at all it goes in the shredder. Rather than on the stack to be counted..
Stacks of unclaimed wood quickly deteriorate and so his choice is to either hang on in the blind hope someone can see beyond the grey. Hoping they realize the first pass in the planner takes away that problem, or sell them dirt cheap to anyone willing to take them..
He simply cannot afford to warehouse wood..
The man he bought the sawmill from had many little buildings where unique and special woods* were stored waiting for just such a buyer.. he worked the sawmill for decades before his health forced him out of the business.
Connie Johnson's first act was to sell off all those unique pieces for pennies simply to get rid of them and then bulldoze the little shacks etc. in order to get the space for the volume he knew would be needed to become profitable.. His insurance rates plummeted as a result and profit started right from the beginning..
I use profit in a modest sense there. While Connie Johnson is land rich having purchased thousands of acres of forest land over his career he lives modestly and extremely frugally..
*Burls, birds eye, fiddle back, etc.. over his decades he's often asked for such special woods but his policy is to toss whatever on the pile and move them out rather than wait for someone to pay some premium for it..
I was friends with one of the guys who did the sawing and he'd select out such special pieces and set them aside for me.. What was great is those were all gifts..
That is I wasn't charged for any of them.. Of course about once a week I'd stop and buy them doughnuts or pop/beer as I hauled the wood home to build my timberframe.
So I guess in one sense I did "pay" for them. On the other hand they'd load my truck for me and then we'd sit and BS for a bit. You do that on a regular basis with people for years and the relationship changes.
What is the name of your sawyer? I'm in Montreal and for a price like that I might be up for a drive
my sawyer is cleaning out inventory as he is shutting down his mill
as far as i know he dosent have anything left for sale
i am meeting him late next week to plck up the quilted birch and if he has anything else left i will let you know !
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