Should I buy a Sawmill?

[00:00:00]What you're watching right now is me at age 28 operating a sawmill in Pal Wyoming that I built in Roseberg, Oregon when I was 22. And it's quite a story. I learned a lot. I have adventures, had adventures, and I fell in love with making sawdust.

[00:00:17]You are probably thinking that you want to own or build or buy a sawmill because you want to either make some money or save some money. You think you can either buy some trees or you have some trees. Well, let's talk about that because there are now so many choices for someone who wants to have a sawmill.

[00:00:36]So many ways to get in trouble. So many ways to make friends. So many ways to learn things that are valuable that you'll never forget. Some of which just might actually make you a little money.

[00:00:51]Let's talk about sawmills and whether you ought to have one. So this mill that you see me operating right here was built because I lived in timber country, southwestern Oregon, Roseberg, timber capital of the nation. Trees were everywhere. The environmental movement had not yet choked off the forest. I uh I knew farmers and ranchers who had trees and needed lumber. And Kelly's granddad, my wife's granddad, had the guts of this old mill built out in a field huge. And I thought that I could shrink it. And I thought that if I could shrink it and build what would be the first portable sawmill in Douglas County that I would have a head start and I could I could provide a service for the land owners with trees. Now before I tell talk any more about the experience of having a sawmill, I want to throw that down as one of the first criterias on whether you should have a sawmill. Do you have trees? It's a different world now. And if you don't have property with trees on it, if you want to provide custom sawing for people that do have trees, that's a whole different business than taking the trees that you have and turning them into lumber that you can use.

[00:02:07]One is in real estate terms, it's an investment. If you have trees and need to build things to buy or build a sawmill, that's an investment. It's a speculation. If you want to buy a sawmill with the hope, with the speculation that you can build a custom sawing business, there are examples of both in Douglas County. I was an example of speculating. I was an example of learning some of the hard lessons of speculation.

[00:02:39]But let's back up to the skills that you ought to have if you think that you want to become a sawmiller. Item one, if you're not fairly comfortable with a chainsaw, you've got no business owning a sawmill. Okay? I mean, the chainsaw is the first thing. And in fact, for very, very little money, if you are familiar with a chainsaw, you can buy an Alaskan mill type of chainsaw, which is a framework. I don't know how many different varieties of those there are.

[00:03:07]now. But you can take a chainsaw you already own, put a longer bar on it, maybe a slightly different chain that is specifically better for ripping, and you can start making boards with a chainsaw.

[00:03:21]You know, a pretty goodiz chainsaw. If you go down that road, by the time you've pushed that sat chainsaw down the length of a few hardwood logs, you're going to realize, you know, maybe if I'm going to do this, I need some kind of a mill that propels itself. That's a little less work. Fair enough. Now, however much however much work it is pushing a chainsaw down the length of a log, it's probably not quite as much. If you, for instance, go to Harbor Freight and buy one of those little, what are they, 25 or 2,800 bucks for a little band saw that will run down a log, but you push it with your own power. Buddy, that's work. Everything about a sawmill is work. The saw has to travel. If you're pushing it by hand, that's hard. The log has to be turned. If you're turning it by hand, that's hard. So, it becomes a trade-off between how much money do you want to lay down on your mill to reduce the amount of labor that it takes to get the boards out of the log.

[00:04:28]Now, there is a type of mill. We did a video on this called the mobile dimension mill, which sort of deals with both these things with a circular saw rather than a band saw.

[00:04:40]Now, these little tools right here are some of the tools that were related to my cir my big mill. It was a 50-in that's 50in circular saw. I was powering it with a 292 six-cylinder Chevy that was I think I was getting 80 horse onto the motor. The teeth insert tooth were 1132 of an inch wide.

[00:05:03]That means essentially 38 of an inch was going out for sawdust every time you cut a line.

[00:05:10]Modern band saws make very little sawdust. That's a plus. A mobile dimension mill sort of reduces the whole challenge of turning a log because it has a trim saw and a headsaw. So, you're edging and cutting the board simultaneously. Better on big logs. Pretty nice on every log.

[00:05:31]And the teeth in those little sawmills, those little blades are much narrower than these guys, but it still makes sawdust. But boy, it's handy. So, I only have firsthand experience with three specific types of mills. The circular saw that you see me running, the mobile dimension circular mill that I went through the factory and I met the Douglases and Keith and Johanna. They're magnificent people and they make a great little mill. I've been around those here in Douglas County in an earlier iteration of the mill. and Woodmiser Mills. Harvey Sauls Backwoods Milling, he has he's pulled his mill onto sites for me, I think, four times. He does a great job. The Woodmiser Mill is in my limited experience with other varieties of bandmills, it's kind of the it's the big dog. It's the Cadillac. And it comes with a variety of laborsaving devices that you can pay for, and they are expensive. live decks, you know, that turn and push and raise and shim and adjust that heavy heavy log so that that super slick and accurate bandsaw can right down. Now, Harvey has made some adaptations on his mill. The ones that I'm aware of are primarily increasing the tension on that band. Whatever mill you buy, particularly the the least the less expensive ones, you're probably going to have to upgrade the ability to put tension on the band saw because if it if it's not tight, it's not going to cut straight.

[00:07:10]Now, a sawmill owner has to be a mechanic. He probably needs to be a welder.

[00:07:18]With the modern mills like Harvey's, you need to be an electrician, a low voltage specialist.

[00:07:24]You have to have some familiarity with the interface between computer chips and and servos. Servos and switches and electrical controls.

[00:07:35]The old mill I built was basic. It was just mechanical. And once I figured that out, you know, off we went. But a modern sawmill operator for a sawmill that can really produce some lumber is going to have to be able to jump in and fix some things. Now having said that I'm only familiar with those three chainsaw wood miser big circle four broad general categories of mills there are others there's baker mills there's a wide variety of sawmill manufacturers and you ought to educate yourself because they all have things to brag about and they all have things that they're not talking about because it's not their strong suit. But in general, a sturdily built, self-propelled bandsaw is going to get you real decent productivity with very accurate lumber, which is what you need if you're going to be selling lumber or expecting other people to pay you for your lumber. And it's what you want if you're going to be building things with the boards that you make. So, let's talk a little more about skills. You know, I mentioned that if you aren't familiar with a chainsaw, you probably don't need to think about a sawmill yet. There's going to be logging. There's going to be the whole dynamic of putting trees on the ground and skidding them and cutting them to log length and how you buck a log without splitting it and getting your your saw hung up. I mean, you can watch Buck and Billy Ray Smith for a lot of real practical guidance on that sort of thing. There's all sorts of YouTube videos, but they're skills that you're going to have to get from somewhere.

[00:09:09]They're not rocket science, but all of them are only going to come to you after you've taken a few chances because you don't know them. So, pay attention when you start getting around logs and trees and cutting and yarding and turning and um there's a lot of ways to get hurt in the sawmill business. Okay. So, one of the advantages I had when I was a kid building a sawmill was I had been logging with my dad since I was 15. So, I understood pretty well the mechanics of pulleys and lines and pryars and peeves and can't hooks and how machinery interacted with logs so I could figure out ways to get logs up onto my mill.

[00:09:53]You're going to have to learn that. how to use mechanical advantage or if you're lucky enough to have equipment, how to learn to use the equipment to handle the logs effectively. I'm going to be talking here pretty quick about whether or not I made any money with my portable sawmill when I didn't have trees.

[00:10:13]And let me just tell you this, there's something I heard years after I got rid of my sawmill that's sort of a bit of country wisdom, and it's this. How do you tell a poor man? He either has a stud horse, a thrashing machine, or a sawmill. Now, there are people who have stud horses who have money. There are people who harvest grain, who have big combines who have money. And there are people who have sawmills who have money, but they're in the minority. I'll just say that right now.

[00:10:45]There's another skill or at least knowledge set that you need to think about because once you start turning logs into lumber, you need to think about what you're going to do with the green lumber that has a moisture content that is off the chart that in many ways is just a a rectangular section piece of water confined in, you know, wood fiber.

[00:11:08]The whole process of getting the water out of the wood is its own combination of art and science. You don't want to have to buy a kiln, do you? Now, the the exception to that, if you're in the custom milling business, moving your sawmill around and cutting for people and leaving them piles of green lumber, understand that a lot of them are going to want to trade you.

[00:11:29]They're not going to want to give you cash. They're going to want you to take part of the lumber with you. Okay?

[00:11:35]pretty soon you're buried in lumber and you you're short on cash. So, one of the ways that you might think about making that lumber more valuable is can I dry it? Well, there there are solar kils.

[00:11:46]There's that whole broad general category of knowledge and all of it costs money to learn. All of it is available on YouTube to learn and maybe you don't want to mess with it. But if you've got your own timber, particularly if it's hardwood, particularly if you're thinking of using that hardwood that's so expensive to go buy for furniture or cabinets or moldings inside of your house or anybody else's, you better start figuring out some way to reduce the moisture or find someone that can. All right, here's another skill that you're going to need to have if you're in the custom sawmilling business or you're thinking of it. And I didn't have it. And so, spoiler alert, I pretty much went broke. Now, part of the reason I went broke was I had a catastrophic trailer accident. It was epic. They write country western songs about that trailer accident or just like it. We did a video on that. You may want to watch that. Suffice it to say, I had 16,000 lbs of lumber pushing my truck around like like uh yeah, like a bulldozer pushing around a box of pingpong balls. It was just pushing me all over the highway and the trailer dumped the lumber and it flipped off my truck over and it tore it landed on the back of my truck and blew out both. So there was a trailer wreck coupled with the fact that I didn't know how to market my services. Here's a fallacy.

[00:13:13]If you build it, they will come. If that was always true, then every storefront where some mom and pop thinks, I'm going to put in a frozen yogurt stand. I'm going to put in a quilting shop. I'm going to put in a an axe throwing shop and they don't know how to market what they're bringing to market. And so pretty soon that storefront's closed and somebody else is moving a bagel shop or a cinnamon roll shop in there. And the first one that moves into that space that knows how to market their wares succeeds.

[00:13:40]If you don't know how to market your sawmilling business, don't buy a sawmill. Now, here's something you may not be thinking of if you do have if you are a Timberlands owner, at least in Oregon. In Oregon, there's something called severance tax. And that is when you go out onto your own property and cut down marketable timber and sell it, you have to pay a severance tax. If they find out that you're cutting down your trees on your place and turning it into marketable lumber and selling the lumber, they're going to come after you for severance tax on that also. Now, the flip side of that is if you're a land owner, a rancher, a farmer, a rancher, and you hire a sawmiller to come in, or you buy a sawmill, you could have cut those trees down, yarded them to a landing, put them on a truck, sent the truck to the mill, and received a check for that wood. And then you could take the money from that check, pay your taxes, and go down to one of the box stores and buy 2x4s for less money than it's going to end up costing you to saw them yourself if you subtract the value of the logs and anything for your time and the wear and tear on your equipment. Did you follow that? 2x4s and 2 by sixs are produced on such a scale commercially that by the time you recognize that the logs had value too, you would have been money ahead to go down and buy them. Now, if it's bigger boards, if you have trees that will make 2 by12s and 4x12s and 6 by8s and 6x12s and the heavier, more expensive cuts, yeah, now it makes sense to take logs you could have sold, but turn them into boards that are very expensive and that you cannot buy at Home Depot. Now, here's what I haven't mentioned.

[00:15:28]the pure joy it is to throw a log on the carriage or onto your mill and judge the opening face, which is the most important cut. The most important cut on a log, is where you cut it open because that automatically limits you to how you proceed through the rest of the log, both to quantity and grade of lumber.

[00:15:48]But there is nothing quite like rolling that unopened Christmas present up onto the deck and onto the carriage and running it through the head rig and getting a look at that opening face and then unwrapping and the brain work around when do I turn, when do I take the thin boards, the jacket boards, when do I take the thick boards, do I want a heart center in that beam or not? You're thinking it absorbs your whole person.

[00:16:16]It absorbs you in such a fulfilling way.

[00:16:20]It's addictive. Once you've made boards, you've got sawdust in your veins and you always want to do it again.

[00:16:29]So, as a retirement project, man, highly recommended. If you're a young man looking to start a family, be a little careful about putting all your eggs in a sawmilling basket.

[00:16:44]So, a as I bounce out of this, let me reiterate a couple things. I don't know everything about every sawmill that's available. So, if you're thinking of this and you don't know anything, maybe get a chainsaw mill, maybe. Or maybe go to one of the very inexpensive little bandsaws where the bandsaw mechanism sets on the track and you push a band saw down the log instead of a chainsaw. Maybe do that.

[00:17:13]Probably safer.

[00:17:16]Or maybe if you have some money, you think about mobile dimension. Keith and Johanna would be happy to sell you a mobile dimension. And they are research and development. They're making them bigger, faster, stronger, smarter. Or you can do a less expensive model. You roll the log onto the deck and you saw right there. Right on. They're they're really cool. and you can cut a long beam or a long board, right? So, check out Mobile Dimension. If you're just after the the most all-around and precise and narrow curve mill with a live deck, look at Woodmiser. I'm impressed every time I see one run. I've had Harvey's and the one up at J&B Wood Products. Trying to think of that fellow's name. I can't think of it. But he did a great job.

[00:18:06]They did a great job on a great big oak log that I had. I'm just delighted with all their results. Think of those four options. Think about whether, dog on it, you just want to build one from scratch because if you do, you can come up with parts, the mechanisms. If you've got a machine shop, if you've got a welder, if you're that guy, man, it's fun to build one. Set aside about a year to figure it out. And try not to hurt yourself while you do it. And that's the takeaway.

[00:18:34]Whatever you do with these things, they can hurt you because if they'll break logs into boards, they will break your body into French friesized pieces.

[00:18:44]So, pay attention.

[00:18:46]Be smart.

[00:18:48]Think about mechanical advantage.

[00:18:50]Don't wreck your back. Make lots of friends. Cut beautiful boards. Make a positive contribution to your community.

[00:19:00]And um when you look back sometime in the past, you can say, "Yep, I was a sawmiller." And there's just nothing like getting boards out of logs.

[00:19:14]Thanks for watching Essential Craftsman.

[00:19:16]And keep up the good work.