StihlKiwi and others, anyone milling on-site?

[KiwiBro]

Of the logs going to local mills, would there be enough room on some of the landings to mill on-site without getting in the way?
I'm not about to table a business proposition but was thinking (probably not enough) about how much is being paid by the forestry owners to truck waste to the mills (if not going to the port), given the lumber recovery rates of mills being nowhere near 100% and the fact it's not exactly value-added product rolling out the forestry gates.

I wonder if there's a case for a reasonably high production mobile or semi-mobile mill on-site, if it doesn't get in the way? It's not likely to keep up with log production, but could be kept fed with suitable logs wth existing machinery and add value to the product and cost less to get it to lumber buyers on flat deck trucks (provided they could get to the landings, which on some of the roads I've seen and used that would be a 'nup') without paying to cart waste wood to the mills.

Can see it would ruffle a few feathers and on that basis alone may deserve to be shelved, but I just wondered if anyone is doing this?

 

[StihlKiwi]

Can't say I've ever heard of someone trying that before and personally I don't think it would be feasible unless you could work around a few big issues:

There typically isn't much spare space on skidsites as it is, and I can see crews getting pissed off with that guy in the corner making a mess pretty quickly.
Other than limbs and offcuts, most of what makes it to the skid ends up on a truck, so you would have to compete with the big guys on price (~$50/t) at the moment for pulp logs, which would hardly be worth running a mill of any sort over.
Logging contractors are paid on a tonnage rate and the trucks are weighed at the mill/port etc, so there would need to be a way of keeping track of what you're getting from them. You could scale every log I guess.
You would probably struggle to produce enough sawn timber to supply most buyers, and it will still need to go to a mill for treating and drying.

I honestly can't see it working, but don't let that stop you.

 

[KiwiBro]

Can't say I've ever heard of someone trying that before and personally I don't think it would be feasible unless you could work around a few big issues:

There typically isn't much spare space on skidsites as it is, and I can see crews getting pissed off with that guy in the corner making a mess pretty quickly.
Other than limbs and offcuts, most of what makes it to the skid ends up on a truck, so you would have to compete with the big guys on price (~$50/t) at the moment for pulp logs, which would hardly be worth running a mill of any sort over.
Logging contractors are paid on a tonnage rate and the trucks are weighed at the mill/port etc, so there would need to be a way of keeping track of what you're getting from them. You could scale every log I guess.
You would probably struggle to produce enough sawn timber to supply most buyers, and it will still need to go to a mill for treating and drying.

I honestly can't see it working, but don't let that stop you.

Good points, thanks. Yeah, there's probably a very good reason nobody is doing it. That being it can't make $.

Certainly not always but occasionally there is somewhere on those roads that's not ideal for a landing but would be perfectly fine for a mill and/or turn around area, and logs could be dropped there once a day when the road is clear.

Pulp logs is not really the target. Saw logs would be. The crux being, could sales of the lumber bring in more than enough to justify the costs of running the mill and the price of saw logs. Having crunched some numbers, but only on R/S, treated timber, it is marginal or suicidal unless it's a cut-to-order service direct to farmers, etc.

It certainly isn't a high volume proposition as it's not likely to put out more than, say, 20m3 of R/S lumber per 8-hr shift and depending on the mill, input and output dimensions, log quality, etc, it could very well be significantly less.

It could work on the small, speciality timber logging ops though, although if there was a way to have milling pine as a 'base-load' kind of operation to keep the mill working (if profitable even if not heavily so) between speciality jobs, or doing speciality cuts, then I think it deserves a spot back on a shelf in the back of my mind rather than in the round filing cabinet.

 

[StihlKiwi]

Sawlogs are ~$95/t at the moment, so that's even steeper. As far as milling and treating timber goes the only way to make a buck out of it with radiata is on a large scale. I worked with a guy last summer who had shut down the family mill and treatment plant (just a small one) because the sawmill down the road was selling sawn timber for less than what he could mill it for.

There's definitely a market for on-site milling of other species though, mainly with cockies who want a row of macs or gums turned into yard timber etc. You can sell plently of sleepers to garden centres and the like as well and they're not hard to churn out if you have a loader and a portable mill.
Macrocarpa's worth 2-3x what pine is, for good logs, so selling loads of sawlog and milling the rest yourself could be a paying proposition.

 

[KiwiBro]

Been looking at a high production (for portable sawmills anyway) mill, but there really isn't enough speciality saw log around to justify the cost compared to cheaper and smaller lower production mills. If I could line up two Summers worth of standing speciality timber, I'd be tempted to bet the house on it, but having tried and failed to build that sort of forward and guaranteed volume, I'm not about to part with over $70k-$100k just to run out of wood after a few months.

Unless we win 'Big Wednesday' (the lottery here) tomorrow night.

So that's where I was wondering about speciality cut-to-order runs of pine - the sorts of things the big boys don't wanna touch.

 

[madhatte]

We had an outfit once ask for, and receive, permission to mill telephone pole cross-arms on the landing. It was during the time awhile ago where timber prices were super-low; making and selling a finished product allowed the outfit to cash in on value added, which in turn made the venture profitable enough that they could afford to bid on the sale in the first place. If this agreement hadn't worked out, it's likely that the sale would not have sold at all. The mill they were using was a trailer-mounted moving bandsaw rig the likes of which I've not seen elsewhere. It was probably a one-off. Either way, it was a win-win for everybody involved.