Sawing up some logs

I have Poplar, Elm, Hickory and Oak on the ground sawn into logs and pilled for the Sawyer. I am thinking about taking down a large Sycamore that has a damaged top. Is that a pretty good selection of wood? I may be able to take a maple or ash too. I have about 10 Black Walnuts but they are a little small. Two are too close together. They are maybe 14 inches in diameter.

I talked to a sawyer on the phone the other day and he wants $55/hour to come out this week end and make my logs into lumber with his Woodmizer. That price was higher than I expected. I believe some one posted here that they paid $300 for a full day of sawing, 10 hours I thought. I will be helping him, stacking the lumber. I have a 30 horse Kabota with loader.

This guy is very nice but I think he only saws on weekends and does not sound all that experienced. He does not sound very fired up to quarter saw either. He says he will cut stickers out of some of my smaller logs. He claims they should not stain, He says buying dried stickers is very expensive.

I am just north of Atlanta in Alpharetta Georgia.

Mike, that price is sure cheaper than out here. I have to drive 160 miles and haul it to the sawyer, and he then gets $65/hr, and even has a 1 hr minimum charge if you only have a small amount to mill. That also doesn't include the blade price if he hits a nail or something. Isn't it amazing what a little Competition can do to prices?

I just had a 16 foot 25 inch white oak quarter sawn. Had him cut it in half so its easier to handle. Also had 6, 8 foot long 18" diameter Tulip poplars done and the whole bill was $225. He said its more work to quarter saw stuff. No idea how long it took him, but the price suited me... Also Id try not to use green stickers if it was me. Also use a hard wood as they will have a lot of weight on them.
Good luck with your wood

Jim Knauss

Hi Mike,

I've had a local sawyer do trees for me twice. I'm fortunate that he only lives about 2 miles away, so he doesn't charge me mileage. Last time he charged me $30/hr, but that was when gas was $1.60/gallon. I would have to imagine his price has gone up somewhat since two years ago. He also will charge by the board foot, whichever he thinks will be less for the customer.

As for stickers, I just bought 1"x2"x8' at the borg. They're about a buck per and I got about $50 worth and cut them to length. I didn't have any staining from them during the drying process.

I would hope you're going to have some help getting all that wood stacked as he saws it for you. I had my wife helping and while I couldn't have done it without her help, I wish we had at least one more person to help. It was a full days work getting it all stacked and we were some kind of tired at the end of the day.

But it is worth the cost, and the sweat after it's all dried, at least to me. It just gives me a real sense of pride to know that as I build something, I'm using wood that came from my land.

i paid 30 bucks an hour....took the wood to him( sawyers highschool aged son) . stacked the wood myself.....with your loader and you helping, you can cut alot of wood in an hour. what is your free time worth? i always ask myself what would i do it for? making lumber ain't easy work......

The price sounds about right seeing as he's coming to you. I'd go with air-dried stickers & stay away from pine stickers with allot of pitch. I've used 3/4 x 3/4 and they worked fine. Put your stacks where they can get a good airflow, out of the shade. I used pallets with recycled trailer house metal on top. Keep the stickers in line. Seal the ends with anchor seal.

You don't want to use wet wood as stickers - you really open yourself up to sticker stain. DAMHIKT. The tannic acid in the oak and hickory can react with the other woods.

You probably have some prep work to do before sawing.

• You need to have a place ready to stack the lumber. It needs to be flat with a good base to set it on. For my stacking area, I dug out dirt until I was down to solid dirt and put down cinder blocks. I used stone dust under the blocks to get things level. I have rows of cinder blocks spaced 16" apart that the lumber can be stacked on.
• I put a layer of (fresh Woodmizer cut) pine 4x4's on the cinder blocks and then the stickers on top of that. Next time I unload the stack (will be this summer), I'll put a layer of plastic under the 4x4's as a vapor barrier between the ground and the wood.
• You need weight on top of the pile to help the top boards dry flat. The weight of the pile will do that for the lower boards. Cinder blocks are cheap and heavy.
• The pile needs to be covered. The tarp should allow for airflow, around the stack. The tarp should overhang the ends and sides so rain won't soak the wood. You don't want the wood to dry too quickly in the beginning or you'll get more checking and the case-hardening will be worse.

When you saw, take a chainsaw and cut the ends of the logs back a little bit to fresh wood so the checking is cut off. Seal that end with AnchorSeal or the comparable stuff you can buy from WoodCraft. It's a LOT easier to seal the end of a log before you saw it than it is to paint the ends of the boards. I had to go back and paint the ends of a set of boards we cut when the temps were below freezing and the AnchorSeal was frozen. Definitely took a lot more time. If you don't seal the ends of the boards, you'll lose a lot of length to checking as the end of the board dries out faster than the middle.

So you guys are sawing up manufactured lumber for stickers! I thought people were buying some sort of special material. I saw some advertised.

Two people are saying they got similar work done for $30/hour which is about what I thought I saw earlier. My guy wants $55/hour almost twice as much which sounds high. This guy is 15-20 miles away. I will stack the lumber. I plan to move it on the front end loader and just stack it by hand. I am hoping to get some help from my 14 year old son and maybe even the wife. Maybe I will ask him about the price again. He had a bunch of ways to charge. I asked for the hourly rate to get something I could compare to.

I am planning to put the wood below a building I have, the bottom being open air. The deck above it is about 9 feet away. The building faces North so I could rig up some sort of solar kiln under there. I have two 5'x10' floors I made for dog pens. The frames are treated 2x4 and the floor 5/4 board. I plan to put the wood on them. I have 10 pieces of 16' tin left over from building that I will use on top of the stacks.

Hourly rate will also depend on what sort of mill he has. An expensive mill with hydralic log handling will cut twice as much in an hour compared to a manual mill. I also costs a whole lot more, so the guy will charge more per hour.

Once the sawyer has seen the logs he should be able to give you an estimate of the time / cost to saw them. 8 hours at $30 / hr or 4 hours at $60 is the same cost. Just one guy has a $10000 mill, the other has a $30000 mill.

Some woods you can get away with green stickers sawn from the same logs, but most of the time it's best to use something dry to reduce staining. Type of wood for the stickers is not usually a big issue, so any dry scrap stuff is OK. Plywood can even be used if need be.

Cheers

Ian

My guy has a hydraulic machine and charged me $50/hr in 2000. We worked for ten hours, him, me and a friend. We were sweating our you-know-what's off and he was a cool cucumber and did a great job. The result of those ten hours...

Start:

http://sawsndust.com/images/milling/logs2.jpg

End:
http://sawsndust.com/images/milling/milling9.jpg

More of the pictorial is available at this link.

Some great ideas guys thanks a bunch. I decided I was not quite ready and put off actually sawing for a little longer. I am replacing all the steel posts under my 60X30 ft building with 6X6's and the wood needs to go in an area that still needs post replacements.

After today, I just have four posts to replace, then I can set up my area to stack lumber in. After reading the posts here, I believe I will sit my 5x10 5/4 board treated pallets on concrete blocks and cut 5 ft 3/4 x 3/4 or larger stickers from scrap boards. Since part of the floor above this lumber is a 5/4 board deck it want stop water. I am thinking about using the 10 pieces of 16 ft tin I have to rig a roof over my wood storage area, under the deck.

I am going to check around on some other sawyers too. I think the guy I am talking to has a smaller mill without hydraulic log handling. He apparently does mostly flat sawn lumber in long lengths. He sounds concerned when I mention quarter sawing. He wants to cut stickers from my poplar and thinks they will not stain. I think I would prefer to cut dry stickers from scrap and have it ready to go before hand instead of using up mill time on them.

Very nice stack of lumber Jim. I never can tell what size logs are in pictures. Looks like you had it sawn into mostly 5/4 and maybe some 9/4 for larger work? That large dark log on top looks like it might be walnut?

Mike, you really need to stack that milled lumber outside to dry...it needs constant air flow, at least until the MC drops well below 20%. You can finish it off in the building, but outdoors is always best for air-drying lumber.

I left out some detail on my building because it is complicated. The building is built into the side of the hill right at 100 year flood plain. The building is on a slight hill and without getting into all the building details like culverts, ponds and french drains, suffice it to say that I am confident water will never get to the building. However, because of building regulations and septic requirements 2/3 of the bottom floor is entirely open, sitting on the posts and the enclosed area is on the second floor. This design makes the top floor a great observation post for the dog training fields and a indoor training area for unpleasant weather.

I plan to store the lumber in the open area under the building so air can circulate all around it. It will get a good amount of sun on three sides (faces North). I may even need to moderate the sun with shade cloth on the front side. I am thinking that a properly installed tin roof may also serve to get a more even sun distribution on my stacks of wood. I took a picture to post but it was to late in the PM and it was hard to see much under the building. I will try to get some better pictures posted soon.