Sawmills for cutting up trees

Blaze

Blaze

The Jeeper Reaper
Joined
Aug 9, 2005
Location
Wake Forest, NC
So some of you guys saw my post about wanting to have some trees cut down in my yard. They are big ass pine trees. Like well over 100ft tall, maybe 3' wide at the base. All alive although some pine beetles.

I was going to just get them hauled off, but then I thought about how I wanted to build an expansion on my shop and maybe I could have the wood cut up into a bunch of lumber to build it.

Anyone have experience with this, and is it worth it to just get a bunch of 2x4 cut? I would need like 125 or so 12' 2x4. Maybe 4 or so 12' 2x10.
 
There's a lot of folks around with the portable sawmills. Don't know what the going rate is now per BF, but it's cheap. Buddy of mine used to run one, I helped him on occasion. Could get even cheaper if you had a tractor/FEL so he wouldn't have to load and bring his, if you did labor offloading and stacking, if he could leave slabs behind (bark sides etc). You can get it milled and kiln dried after cutting, if you want. Biggest problem he had with trees coming out of yards was metal in the wood ruining blades. Screwhooks or brackets where people over the years hung bird feeders, hammocks, whatever. Finally figured it was cheaper and easier to just not saw the bottom 8-10' of the tree, rather than the cost and time in blades.
 
So I found a place by my house that charges $80 per hour for services. I calculated it out based on HD lumber prices, which are the top end of the prices I would pay, and they'd have to be cutting a 2x4 every 11ish minutes to match that price. I don't know about how long it takes, but can't imagine it being that long.

Also, that helps me with the price on cutting the trees down because I only will have to pay to drop the trees and grind the stumps.
 
If they are that big, you can get some money or a shit ton of 2x4's out of them. Last time I took some around here, it was about $0.20/board foot, and those trees should be around 2000 board feet, so maybe $400 or so. The guy I take stuff to only charges $0.15/boardfoot to mill em, so that would give you more boards than you know what to do with for $300.
 
paradisePWoffrd said:
As Kaiser said, you will need to dry the boards if you plan on using them inside, so factor that cost in to it as well.
Click to expand...

Yeah, this guy said he can help with drying as well. Hopefully he'll come out soon and we can figure things out.
 
You can rack/sticker the boards as you stack them and let them air dry.. common for barns. (Preferably inside but tarped is ok too, just leave air space on the ends so air can get to it)
 
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