Thanks for the comment guys, I thought long and hard about the need for a mill in this part of the country. The deciding factor occured early in August, 2007. At about 1:00AM there was a plough wind blow througt our area, the north edge was 6 miles south of us and leveled crops and tree in a 7 mile swath, right down to the south Saskatchewan river. As we do quite a few hazard removals at a regional park in the path af destuction, our phone began ringing at 6:00AM. We spent the first day removing trees from inside roofs of cabins, day 2 and tree were clean-up and retoration of surviving trees, and the fourth day we brought in a 106 foot/ 40 ton crane. We ended up removing 5 90' poplars from one lot. These were all in the 30" DBH, and were removed with 1 cut about a foot off the ground. The last day was spent bucking all the logs into 18" lenghts and were given away for free to three people.
The wood discibed here was hauled away in six three ton trucks (heaped). As we live in an area that doesn't have a lot of trees, fireplaces are rare. The logical use for the wood is a mill, and even though the wood is poplar, the ranchers keep phoning for slabs for porosity fencing. It didn't take long to find out that 5" and larger slabs 8' long sell for $800.00 Canadian dollars/cord.
The mill was not purchased as seen in the picture, it came with the complete head and two 7' sections of track. I priced out another section of track, but opted to build my own so I could cut 20' lengths. The dealer wanted $600.00 for a 7' length of track with a log dog on it, and I wanted an extra log dog which would have cost me about $320.00. I went to the local welding shop and bought all the material for the track and the dogs for $221.00. The trailer that is under the mill was home built from scrape iron from John Deere rodweeders from abandoned farm sites (free for the taking with permission).
The total cost for a mill that will cut a 30"diameter log 20' long, was under $9000.00 CD. By the way the reason we have made the mill mobile is logistic, the question around here is do you haul the wood to the mill or the mil to the wood? One way or the other you always have to haul wood. In my defence, the mill is a machine that is used to deal with our scrape that is too large to go through our chipper(12"), and we chip our scab material, and sell the chips. You might say we are mini recyclers.
It has been a vertical learning curve with how to maximize the boards from a log, but I should add that we are much more aware of the number and damage that insects do to live apparantly healthy trees.
Feel free to make comments or constructive criticism, I AM a farmer and an arborist, who lives in the frozen north
