Hands off scaling

[Spotted Owl]

Can anyone here explain to me hands off, no touch scaling at the mill?

A local mill around here has gone to this. No more scalers, They are going total hands of milling, the only thing a person touches are buttons, control boards and levers to make machines work. How does this work? How do they account for defect or any of the other things a scaler used to do?

All I now is, not one good thing has been heard about this new process. the only thing the drivers get is an off-load number, mill numbers aren't lining up with anyone else's numbers, lots of bad blood starting to come about over this. Best thing for the mill is they're the only game within reasonable distance.

A few have heard of this process, most, including me have not. How in the world can you scale a log with out hands or eyeballs?



Owl

 

[northmanlogging]

Not to sure on the hands off thing, I do know that my scale tickets haven't been real spectacular lately. May have to start hand scaling before I send em in. I have options for mills but the close ones are crooked, and the good ones are to far away to be profitable.

 

[slowp]

The newer mills here pay by weight. There is a mill in Centralia, now owned by "that company in Californy" that takes only 6 people to run it. More are needed to maintain the equipment than to run it. It was designed, before the Californication, to pretty much run logs through when they are unloaded. They don't have much room for decking.
The weight scale is mechanized. Truck drivers just punch in a few numbers for ID purposes.

Even the Forest Service has gone to weight scaling if the trees are pretty uniform. There can be a problem because they want a third party scaler to punch in numbers and oversee the weighing. That can be waived, and was for trucks hauling to the mill in Centralia.

 

[treeslayer2003]

computer and scanners i expect...........but we get paid by weight for pine here, 12lbs per bf. get screwed if the timber happens to be light like in summer.

 

[Gologit]

That "california company" Slowp speaks of has a pretty good system for scaling. Well, it's good for the company anyway.
The majority of the logs are bought by the ton. On a new sale, and then periodically thereafter, a few loads will be weighed and ground scaled and a percentage of defect baseline established. The scalers also establish a bf/ton ratio. Kinda. More or less. Roughly. Very roughly.
The logs that are just weighed and not ground scaled will have an automatic percentage deducted from every load based on the ground scale averages. Since every log is different but the scale deduction for defect remains the same it's a mystery to most of us how this is considered fair.
The scalers work for an independent company that provides scalers for all the mills. This is supposed to insure that the scaling is honest and without any bias to either the logger or the mill. Riiiiight.
Here's the good part. Most of the timber the company harvests is from it's own land and is milled in their own mills.. They own almost two million acres in California alone so it's not hard for them to keep a steady of flow of their own timber going .
The logging is done by contractors. No company loggers. The loggers are generally paid by the ton but that rate can and does vary from job to job. Sometimes it varies from landing to landing, depending on what the check scalers come up with.
The last time I counted the company owned 9 sawmills in northern California. If that's not a monopoly it's real close.
The scalers, while theoretically unbiased, know that if they want to continue working they're pretty much going to have to work for the same company no matter where they go. If they can slant the scale just enough to favor the company without starving the loggers in the process they're probably going to keep their jobs.
So, I think hands off scaling is mostly already here and has been for awhile. What little FS wood we see is ground scaled and check scaled more often than private timber or company timber but a lot of it...especially thinning jobs and plantation reductions...are tonnage all the way.

 

[madhatte]

Since every log is different but the scale deduction for defect remains the same it's a mystery to most of us how this is considered fair.

That's a problem on my side as well. Foresters are well aware that every tree is different, which is why a cruiser has to get good at spotting defect and taper and all that, so that a cruise is as accurate as possible. Our growth models have evolved pretty quickly in the last few years, as well, largely thanks to smaller/faster/cheaper computers, but the mills already "know" what they're going to pay for a load, so we have to deliberately cripple our much-better models in order to meet the expected utilization at the mill. The contract logger is stuck in the middle. They have to trust our cruise in order to bid, but they only get what the mill pays them for the load. It's my opinion that it's deliberately dishonest to break and misuse a model this way, but we have to protect our contractors or we don't sell any timber.

 

[slowp]

Hampton still has scalers and scale ramps. They also weigh loads. If things get totally mechanized, how will the goss...oops INFORMATION get spread?

 

[madhatte]

I have a feeling that goss.. oops INFORMATION will find a way.

 

[treeslayer2003]

madhatte or miss P, i tryed using doyle standing rule a few times........it was way low. on the tracts i got, i was pretty close with my guesstimate. any reason for this y'all can think of? on pine it was low about 30%.......hardwood was nearly half.
it was all big with little taper................it seems to me the lack of taper is what made up the difference........curios what you guys think.

 

[madhatte]

Doyle is a pretty old rule. As I recall, it has the very strong tendency to underestimate small logs and to overestimate large ones. This has something to do with the way it calculates lost volume due to kerf. Scribner, and Scribner Decimal "C", by contrast, don't do a very good job with either taper or long logs. The best way I've found to get around this is to use a second table to estimate overrun. There's a good one locally for DF as well as tables for hemlock and pine which show the diameter where the switch occurs (in our DF it happens at around 40" DBH). I suspect that there is one that works for your area as well.

Note also that log rules are just that -- rules for estimating the merchantable volume of logs -- and are neither scaling nor modeling. This is a big part of why cruises never match scaled volume -- it's impossible to make better than a rough approximation of marketed lumber when you consider unseen defect, topwoood, handling breakage, and operator error at all steps along the way. What we typically do is deliberately underestimate our volume by about 20% so that if the sale scales out better than we say it will, it looks like a good value to the logger. We can't afford to burn goodwill by cutting teeth over particulars, no matter how it grates me to misreport things on purpose.

EDIT: I should also note that we do all of our estimation using a lookup table based on a tarif table generated by OSU, which gets us in the ballpark, and then correct it using a 3-part growth model, to give the best-possible estimate of standing volume, which we feed into our inventory system for ownership-wide calculation of similar stands. It's only after this that we cripple the numbers to sell the logs "fairly". We do actually have a very good idea what our volume is before and after a sale, and those numbers are very different from what is reported as sold to the DOR.

 

[treeslayer2003]

i have herd that but i had the oposite problem. big poplar....40" no taper and at least 4 16s.........it came out almost 50% under my guesstimate. at the end of the harvest i was 5-10% low on my estimate any way. if i knocked off 20% i prolly would have lost the sale. maybe i figured sumthin wrong but i done this several times now. needless to say i stick with my way.

what you do sounds complacated............i ain't got the learnin lol.

 

[northmanlogging]

There's a reason I pay on percentage... I can guestimate how many loads are in a patch, but I'll be damned if I can tell a guy how much money is standing there after a short walk through their woods.

I've spent the time to really cruise a few patches, usually patches I intend to buy, to do it proper takes patience and lots of note keeping... so far I've been dissapointed... just not enough trees on the bits I can afford, or no way to get them with the equipment at hand...

 

[madhatte]

Variable-Probability Sampling, y'all. It's the way to do things. Simple, quick, accurate, repeatable. If you have reason to sample everything, say, a select cut, 3P is even easier. There's some trickery involved but mostly computers do the heavy lifting. Smaller trees are more variable than larger ones, and need a bigger sample. Heights are more variable than diameters in a given stand, and need a more accurate sample. Cruise design is all about getting the best numbers with the least work. LiDAR is getting good enough to use, too. I can explain it better in person than by writing it out.

 

[imagineero]

This isn't in any mill I've seen but probably the way of the future. Hard to imagine getting a more accurate scale or better numbers out of any stick than what you get there, and I'm sure every last ounce of sawdust is accounted for and tracked. End of an era just the same though.

http://www.arboristsite.com/community/threads/swedish-milling-then-and-now.261189/