How I make money with my sawmill

good morning everybody today is going to be a milling day we are going to put some logs on the mill and turn into lumber i've got a few one by eights to make eight feet long and ten feet long and some two by fours for a little order but first i got a little business to take care of i've got a sticker from jason uh mountain peacocks and i'm going to put that on a place i've got an inside of my garage door on the other side of the garage that i've been putting stickers for years so i'm going to go over there put that on there and that door gets held open sometimes so we'll see some sun and we'll see how long this sticker lasts in the sun and just to give his channel a shout out if you like what i'm doing here in this channel you're gonna love what he does he takes it to a whole other level it's um the quality of his videos are i'm not even gonna try to compete with him um i think he's gonna go places uh in the youtube world if you will so anyway let's go put this up and then we'll get into milling so stand by and we'll get some some lumber cut so walking through my office into the shop this is where i made my living for a lot of years where i keep my tractor overnight and keep it out of the weather to the best of my my ability and my little log loading crater from iron baltic i keep it in this inside as well you guys have seen a few videos of that i got to get some more videos in action turn some lights on here so you can see what i'm up to i got my friend jamie's truck that uh it's a 3500 dodge ram i'm gonna put a turbo on that as soon as it shows up he's been having trouble with this truck and we did a delete which means we took the egr cooler off and um any air valve and just just to tidy it up a little bit and make a little more reliable but uh he still has a turtle actually a problem so we're gonna tidy that up and here we are to the the wall of stickers on the door inside so let's find a happy place for that sticker right below the range road sticker range road has been really good to me i've got a few other products um i've got of course the firewood processor and i've got the live deck table and i've got a trader that's the iron baltic trader but it's exactly the same trailer so jason you're going to live right there for a little bit excellent there you go all right let's get to work sometimes i take the ends of the logs if i'm trying to make a log that's somebody wants a specific length of log so i'll take a an 18 foot log let's say and turn it to a 16 foot or or less i take the ends and i just bring my wood splitter down from my firewood yard and turn it into soft wood firewood usually give this firewood away to some folks if they're in need of it or use it in our own little campfires but i'm gonna build a bundler i believe and put some of this campfire wood together just to make a little more just a little market for this stuff so it's uh nothing here goes to waste the little edges that come off the sides of the boards when we edge the boards we run them through a chipper on the back of our tractor and it turns it into this business right here and we use that around our paths and gardens and that kind of stuff to keep weed control down and the slabwood we keep in a rack this holds about two-thirds of a cord or so and of course it spills on both sides because i typically make more slabs than people will pick up but i give this to a gentleman as well a couple of people will come around and pick it up but if they're interested in getting this the slab would they're more than welcome to have it i don't mind somebody wants to make a couple of dollars on it it's usually more effort for me than it's worth to process it but i might put some through my processor just to just get the value in the btus out of it for making maple syrup so we go through probably a quart of wood to make our maple syrup and of course wood doesn't cost me anything if i use the scraps i seem to have lots of scraps around so anyway let's get this mill up and running so after i unwrap this mill i uh just put a new blade on last i don't think there's three logs on this blade so i checked my tension i know you can't see that from there but we can get up to uh 2700 pounds tension with this little hydraulic ram up to 2000 already it really doesn't take a whole lot effort 26 27 pounds 2700 pounds rather and make sure that our water tank is got lots in it i'll raise this up really is effortless to raise i have a control panel here and i have a speed control forward reverse makes for effortless milling that's for sure so this is old wormy garbage wood i'm not even sure what i'm gonna do with that and put it aside for now and and then sort of figure that out i guess as time goes on i made a six by six i was trying to get some one by sixes out of it but there's too many bugs in this wood it's just trash so i'm gonna use it maybe for an upright for a building or i have no idea what to do with it it's a piece of old white pine that's been sitting around a long time so i'll get my tractor and grapple and lift that up to stage the mill for the next log i always put my back stops up and then what i'm gonna do is start the mill well i like to let it warm up i always double check that my fuel line is on it's got a quick connect on it like an outboard motor quick connect and uh it will uh sometimes the tarp i put on will flap and will end up causing little grief but anyway let's fire up all right so we need to get eight pieces of 1x8 out of a log and in order to get eight pieces of one by eight you need to have a log that's uh 11 and a half inches at the small end so this one here is going to be pretty close oh yeah for sure that's uh 13 inches inside the bark at the small end and 14 inches almost 14 inches at the big end so that'll be the log we're going to get oh let me go get the tractor take a little better bite on it wonder if i can do this with one hand in my camera all right this log really doesn't weigh anything it's not not compared to what the tractor is capable of lifting probably weighs 300 pounds or something like that very gently laying down soon as it starts to touch i let the grapple go so i'll clamp that log in place and start cutting trying to get a better idea what this camera has a mind of its own it seems anyway let's get at here just let it against the stops i lift up my clogged hug that little clamp doesn't take much effort to hold these logs in place and then i kind of sound an idea how far from the bunk i want to make my cut so looks like a 12-inch cut will be just about perfect it's pretty cylindrical not too concerned about about the pith when i'm cutting these these small one-inch boards pump up my coolant tank and that'll drip as soon as it gets the full throttle there's a switch on the back the motor i put on opens up the valve that allows that to drip on the blade a little bit up to 12 inches on our cut and open our throttle [Music] you always have a look down the log make sure you're not going to cut your log dog your packs off top we can feel a lot and it also takes a couple of passes to get the blade to uh take a consistent consistent uh what's the word i'm looking for 2 700 pounds so the the tension on the blade has to stay at the same um it wasn't just words apologize for that you got to keep a consistent tension on the blade all the time when you're milling and if you don't you'll end up getting waves in your cuts and just won't be quality of wood just isn't going to be there so we'll take this upside down keep a pv right on my tractor all the time i'm gonna have a look behind the camera see if i can see what you're seeing if it still makes sense oh yeah i think that'll make sense to you i'll cut this video up and uh maybe make it make sense a little more sense to you once i edit it i might even add a little voiceover so these little logs are such a trick to work with small in diameter and make sure there's no bark under there they're short they're not heavy and you get a lot of yield out of these logs this is a log that is worth a lot of money when it's finished because it's almost clear the definition of a clear pine log or any log is three knots and 16 feet this is going to have more than that but it's still going to be a pretty log so now we take our trusty tape measure what's our next cut going to be we want to make sure that we're getting the best yield so we'll go down to 10 inches and that'll give us a 10 inch cant we'll get 10 1 by eights out of this and a little bit more so i got a pointer here 11 10 right there 10 inch mark and what that is is 10 inches from the from the bunk to the bottom of the blade that's where our 10 inch mark is going to come in and that'll give us a 10 inch wide cant out of this so [Music] that's a wonderful sound i love that sound the blade took the wood smells so nice here i hope it's not too early in the world [Music] push that off the stops a little bit so i can lift them up and lift these stops up as high as they'll go they'll go up about 14 inches and of course i'll cut those off if i left them that high so i have to pay attention to that but when i built this mill i made sure that those stops were exactly 90 degrees when they're clamped in painstakingly made sure they were 90 degrees to the deck so that i don't really have to keep double checking my uh my square to make sure that they're truly 90 degrees but i do keep a carpet square here just to make sure bang on perfect couldn't be burped couldn't get any better but it's good to check it down again so then i lower those back stops down quite a bit and once again take my tape measure this is just a little dewalt magnetic tape measure we'll do our 12-inch cut on that and normally that sits right here 12-inch cut perfect and lots of throttle and the ideal world i'd have a backdrag on this mill and i would have the slabs pulled back so that i can load my slab pile the boards are coming back i like to get an edger as well so i can set the edger up and let it go be a lot quicker a lot more product productivity i'll take another one inch board off of that took another one-inch board off that's cutting really nice you can tell when the blade comes back over the wood if there's any dips or dives in it now is the time to catch it and there's 11 inches just about to get rid of all of the wings so we put this board aside and i'll edge that here so we'll maybe get a one by six probably [Music] i think what i'll do is i'll take one more one inch off of that make sure i'm gonna get my eight inches so that's ten inches wide so we need to make sure we're gonna get our eight inch if i take one board off of that no i better not i better roll that over what we'll do is we'll end up taking this down to eight inches so if i had my edger i would be able to edge one side and slice this whole log down continuously right to the bottom and then run it [Applause] then i get all my one point one by eight of the chapter this white pine you can pretty much fill it as fast as you want to go spruce that's sitting around a while is dry and it's really dense so i typically cut off the ends of the logs about uh i don't know i think probably three inches off into the logs of the firewood and what that will do for me is prevent me from having to worry about the dense uh wood making the blade the blade drive up or down and that hopefully will be able to eliminate all of the wane that we think all the back on the uh on the side of this we'll flip this up another 90 degrees [Music] so this is a nice clean square side here and we're going to just turn that up i'm sorry turn that down i'm going to take one board off the top you can see there's a little wayne here on the corner and we have ten one by eights here the top one we may end up just uh turning it into a 1x6 because of this this corner which is okay that's not the end of the world exactly ten inches so we'll go to nine inches take a cut and then we'll edge those boards as we go i'll show you how i do this it's a little time consuming but i think it'll be okay i might move the camera a little closer notice my throttle's a little sticky i'd have to pull that off and pull the cable off see what's going on it's not sticky on the return [Music] so there that's our nine inch mark we're gonna take another one by eight off of that and that'll be our first board for the customer all right so there's our first our first money board so you can see i've got an 8x8 cant on the mill i just finished lubricating my throttle cable it's a bit sticky um this really should have a building put over it so that it's out of the weather but so from there's eight one by eights that'll fill that whole order so i'll start ripping those down and when i get down to um take two boards off then i'll stand those other boards up beside it and edge them and hopefully it'll make sense here in a minute but anyway let's get at here [Applause] seven inches so six inches there's two more one bytes [Music] we'll put those in the pile a customer can pick them up later on today so what we have now is a six inch cant six by eight and i'm going to stand those boards up take there's a one square edge this one's a square edge we'll let that one down by the side and stand up this one here we'll stand this one this way this doesn't make a whole lot of difference and that's that so we'll stand those up as straight as we can this up and we'll take that to seven and a bit inches go back we'll go up a little bit from six seven in a bit and we'll take that edge off i don't know why i waited so long to remove that throttle it works so much better now i was wrestling with that the last few days i've been milling saying to yourself wanting to stop and move that always need to have more things to do with maintenance and these edges get thrown over here and we uh give those a a dressing later by addressing i mean we grind them up and turn them into something useful all right so all these have a nice square edge on them now this one here has got a little bit of weighing on it so i can leave that alone take that down a one by six that'll give us four nice pieces of one by six those get stacked up in my lumber rack which i'll show you here in a minute so this is the best way that i know how to get the the most yield out of a log so we're going to end up with uh three nine pieces of one by eight so that's 72 dollars worth of one by eights and four one by sixes so just about 100 bucks we've made out of this log all together not including a little slab wood if i were to be able to turn that into some a little bit of money too might be 15 or 20 with a firewood it was in bundle form the economics of running the mill pretty cheap it's not like i had to buy it and i built the mill i spent a lot of money on material i would love to have bought a like a wood miser you know a big hydraulic mill or something but at this stage in my life i'm happy with this all right let's make some more boards i sure hope this new microphone is working out for us you can't hear what i'm saying now that i might have to uh voice over so so so so so so every certainly no effort so [Music] so [Music] next all right so we'll just get ready now for the next log put our lumber away and that's just how easy you can make 100 bucks so less than a half an hour and that's including video time and fixing the throttle cable and getting the log and i could stage this if i had a friend which i do have a guy the guy that owns a truck actually that's in the shop him and i work he's here someday we can we can go through a lot of lumber a short period of time get the logs processed and then i just use the tractor to uh remove the lugs remove the lumber rather to my lumber rack [Applause]

Channel: The Log Father

Views: 62,855

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Id: 8eZY5timHos

Length: 31min 5sec (1865 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 28 2021