Advice on downed timber

shelby27604

shelby27604

Well-Known Member
Joined
Jun 6, 2013
Location
Efland NC
We have had a couple trees come down in the recent storm, wondering if I can actually generate any income from them, rather than buck them into firewood I don't currently need (my firewood cup runith over).

I had a very large white oak come down, roughly 30"-36" at the base, and straight for 20'+ Would need to buck it into something smaller than that to get it out of the woods. Will timber buyers go through the trouble of picking up / paying for logs like this?

Second issue is the abundance of pine trees committing suicide on our property, I have a pile of logs, filled with beetles continuing to eat away at the logs. I don't mind making them into firewood if there is a market for them (out door boilers?). Whenever I see firewood for sale, it is never pine.
 
You need a small operation with a band mill. The market has really softened in the last couple years. The pine is gonna be a hard sell for anything other than chip wood or shavings. Beatle killed pine is almost worthless for anything other then chips or mulch wood. A small market did exist for something called "Blued Pine boards" or sometimes referred to as "Blue Jean" pine. The window is small due to the quickly deterioration of the heart wood and sap wood going bad even faster.

Blue Jean pine makes beautiful craft wood for siding (interior) and some less structural applications. Used properly it still needs kiln dried.
 
drkelly said:
My experience has been nobody wants the pines.
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That was my assumption.

WARRIORWELDING said:
You need a small operation with a band mill. The market has really softened in the last couple years. The pine is gonna be a hard sell for anything other than chip wood or shavings. Beatle killed pine is almost worthless for anything other then chips or mulch wood. A small market did exist for something called "Blued Pine boards" or sometimes referred to as "Blue Jean" pine. The window is small due to the quickly deterioration of the heart wood and sap wood going bad even faster.

Blue Jean pine makes beautiful craft wood for siding (interior) and some less structural applications. Used properly it still needs kiln dried.
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Do people pay for these, or at least pick them up for free?
 
I've been piddling with this stuff for nearly 2 decades and its still one of the biggest challenges. My parents have a neighbor that will take oak for firewood if I don't want it, but he won't pay for it. There's a sawmill near me that will take pine for about $5-7/ton, and another that will pay a little better by the boardfoot but they are harder to deal with and aren't always buying and have weird hours. Nobody around here buys hardwoods, so I end up splitting it or cutting it on the sawmill and watching it rot. I need to build a shed to put it under. I've had some spalted maple, black walnut, red oak, white oak, and cherry boards listed on FB for over a year and I've sold ONE board. All that to say, its hard to get rid of timber unless you have enough to entice a logger, or something really special.
 
shelby27604 said:
That was my assumption.


Do people pay for these, or at least pick them up for free?
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Side hustlers want everything free! Doesn't matter the hustle in my experience.

Small legitimate business may pay. Most of these would rather come custom cut what you want to keep or trade a portion of the lumber. You get some they get some.

In the end the headache probably isn't worth it. A free wood add targeted at a small band mill, mulch operation might hook a potential deal but unlikely. The market got real soft when everybody and their brother bought cheap Chinese mills thinking they struck gold.

A local high end wood workers shop or guild might get word to a potential interest. That or search a local band mill operator in your area and reach out.
 
shelby27604 said:
That was my assumption.


Do people pay for these, or at least pick them up for free?
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I had been slowly taking the pines down on my property, but there were just too many of them, so I ended hiring a guy. Nobody quoted doing it for free. I think I paid $8,000 for a guy to take down about 50 pine trees on my property. I had him push most of them in a gulley, so he didn't even have to haul them off.
 
I burn pine a lot, but also oak, maple, Bradford pear, birch, poplar, and whatever else I can get. But its almost always just ejat somebody had blow down and its always free.
 
drkelly said:
I had been slowly taking the pines down on my property, but there were just too many of them, so I ended hiring a guy. Nobody quoted doing it for free. I think I paid $8,000 for a guy to take down about 50 pine trees on my property. I had him push most of them in a gulley, so he didn't even have to haul them off.
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That’s a better deal than I was quoted. I had about 5 or 6 giant pines I wanted taken down. The “friend” price was $6000. Told him thanks but no thanks. Ended up dropping one on my own that needed to go. Took it to a mill and used the rough cut for a condo deer stand.
 
I have a 36" band mill and and mostly take free or "easy and cheap" logs. If I have to drive far or do the work to load, they're typically going to be free or paying me to take them. If it's really nice logs, something I want, etc. and they can load them, I'll occasionally pay a little for them. Loading is the key part. I don't have a self-loading trailer and if I have to bring a piece of equipment out to load, that usually means at least one extra trip to recover the equipment. I've traded some planks or a slab out of the tree for logs before...if it was something in someone's yard and they wanted to make something out of it.

For the most part, timber companies aren't going to pick up a small quantity of logs and most mills won't take anything less than full truck loads. The exception being if it's something really expensive - like if you had a decent pile of high grade black walnut.

The other problem you run in to is most mills don't want anything to do with "yard logs". Anything that is or was close to a house, farm, etc. where there may have been nails/screw/bolts in it at some point in its history. A single nail can kill a $50 band blade on my mill. On a big circle mill, they can do thousands of dollars in damage if they miss it with the metal detector.

The other thing that's funny is they have all these "log value calculators" on the internet and people use those and think that's what their logs are worth....not realizing that it's the value of the lumber after it's been cut, hauled, milled and dried. You'll occasionally see someone trying to sell a single black walnut log or tree for thousands of dollars on FBMP.....and 6 months later you'll still see them trying to sell it. :laughing:


I will take pine if it's on the bigger side (14"+), fresh and easy to pick up. I have a 120 year-old barn that's sided in 6" and 8" board and batten pine planks up to 22' long that I'm eventually going to restore and is one of the reasons I bought my mill in the first place. I've also been making white oak beams to replace some of its rotten substructure.


I'd probably be interested in the white oak, especially if you can load it. I'd typically want 10 or 12 foot long logs for those and at 30" diameter, you're looking at a little over 320 lbs per foot of log....so a 12' log will weigh almost 4k.

And I'd be interested in fresh-cut pine if you had stuff you were planning on taking down and we could time pickup so it doesn't sit around very long. The beetles move in ridiculously fast on that stuff.
 
I'd be interested in coming to get that white oak but can't pay anything. Is there any way to get my truck to it? I have winched logs onto my trailer with pretty good success.
 
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