A year or two ago there was a small article (two or three pages) about a company in California (I think LA) that was taking logs from various tree removal jobs in the city and cutting the logs into lumber. It was more or less an environmental project to use that lumber and to sell it as specialty lumber instead of it ending up in the garbage dump.
I have looked in all of my old copies of Fine Woodworking but obviously I have misplaced that copy.
I have tried using the index search on the website with no luck.
Does anyone know what issue that was in?
I am thinking of doing a small company to do the same type of project in Houston and I wanted to talk to the owner of the sawmill/woodlot in LA to discuss economic feasibility.
Replies
You might consider contacting folks who have bandmills like the woodmizer. etc. The big issue is nails and metal embedded in the wood. We do a lot of recycled timbers but it's not the same as the metal is nails, spikes, etc put in after the milling of the timbers. Replacing teeth on a circle saw is more expensive than replacing a band. You should be able to come up with feasibility pricing through other methods.
I work for our local parks (and forestry) dept and I would guess that it would be hard to make any money doing it. first off municipal trees are normally loaded with nails and wire and anything else people can hammer into them. I have hit chunks of rebar in the middle of 20" maples before along with rocks and anything else you can imagine.
Second material handleing in a habitated area is much more complicated. Most city tree work is done to eliminate dead hollowed or diseased wood anyway, seldom do you cut a tree down that has even a very good trunk. occasionally when you get a good storm some good may uproot but thats the exception rather than the rule. a couple of years ago I brought home 5 @26" hickory 12' long logs that I was gonna have sawn. ended up not doing it and they went to the firewood pile. Nice tree to straight as an arrow, no branches forever. came out of one of our parks.
There's an outfit in the San Francisco area working at that: http://www.recycletrees.org/. There's also one in Fresno, but I don't have the name.
Are there any hardwoods around Houston besides maybe Live Oak that would be fit for lumber? Lots of rain equates to fast growing and hence poorer grade lumber. Pine, yeah, but hardwoods?
Also, like someone else said, around an urban area there would be just to many nails and other errata in the logs. I sawed into a railroad spike once with my chainsaw. Was goodbye chainsaw blade!
PlaneWood by Mike_in_Katy (maker of fine sawdust!)
PlaneWood
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