custard":w6rqw54e said:
This is a regular sentiment on this forum, a local tree comes down and the expectation is a bonanza of dirt cheap and good quality timber.
I'm sceptical. The great majority of trees, especially those grown outside of managed woodland, generally aren't that suitable for furniture because they're likely to be pretty unstable in service, or they're too old and have rotten cores, or they're too knotty, or suffer from any of a thousand other shortcomings. And that's before the mammoth task of planking, extracting, and drying the wood.
If you're making fence posts I understand the attraction, but for quality furniture a day spent at a decent timber yard will give you far better quality and choice. Plus, for the quantities that a hobbyist or even a small professional maker consumes the cost of timber yard bought wood really isn't all that high. After all, a bedside table doesn't need much more than a cubic foot of timber, costing say £50 or £60. And for that a hobbyist can keep themselves busy for a good few months while they concentrate on producing something of really good quality with a dovetailed drawer with drawer slips, nicely tapered legs, excellent mortice and tenon work, and maybe even some fine inlay work or cockbeads. If you've only got a few hours a week to spare then surely that's a more sensible use of time rather than weeks of graft processing a few cubic metres of likely inferior quality timber?
I have an Alaskan mill and have been milling trees for about 15 years now. On my own I can do up to about 36" dia and I make 8' long planks to fit in my Sauno kiln.
With my mate working with me we can plank up to about 50" wide which are very heavy but managable. When I think of all the trres we have done over the years there are only one or 2 that would have been accessible to a woodmizer, so that means they would have all been firewood or left to rot. We have milled oak, yew, walnut, ash, beech, sycamore, douglas fir, cherry and some other one-off specimens. 90% have all been milled within about 3 miles radius of the workshop so we didnt have a long journey hauling the timber home. In the 15 years there have only been 2 trees that have been rotten in the middle or shattered when falling over, which is not wasted anyway as we still get a good lot of firewood out of it.
All our trees are windblown and that means we just have to take them as they lie rather than fell them in a suitable direction to mill up. We both have quite a lot of money invested in our set up, but when that is compared to a kiln with 2.5 cubic metres of oak in it then its a quite good return. It helps that my mate also has a landrover and trailer for bringing out the wood to my van which saves me from getting stuck in the woods and we also have a variety of winches and other gear for moving logs into the best position for milling. Maintaing the saws and chains takes a lot of effort and dosh. A lot of people try it and decide its too much work and easier to buy timber which I agree with to some extent, but there is nothing better than being able to show the pictures of you milling up a tree to a potential customer and telling them exactly where the tree came down and when it came down and also that it was windblown and not cut down deliberately to make furniture.
