Custom Sawing & Furniture Building: A Better Retirement Plan

By Danny Hamsley, Hamsley Forestry, LLC.


After purchasing the LT15 sawmill in 2002 for personal projects, I started selling a little lumber that I had in excess of what I needed, and was surprised at the interest that I got from local woodworkers.  I developed a plan to retire at age 57 and focus on sawing and selling hardwood lumber and working as a Forestry Consultant since I am a Registered Forester.    

I was able to retire in April 2011. I am also now able to spend more time turning that high quality lumber produced on the sawmill into high quality, custom furniture.  My business, though small, is all about timber, lumber, and furniture.  If I tried to go and buy the lumber, the profit would not be there at my scale to justify it.  The sawmill makes the whole strategy work, and it is the keystone of the whole process.

  

I saw to maintain an inventory of the various hardwood species that local woodworkers are after.  When I am not sawing, I may be working on the lumber, stacking, air drying, sorting, etc.  People call and come buy lumber just about anytime 7 days a week.  I also spend a lot of time on the furniture side of things.  I always have some type of furniture project on the drawing board or in progress. 

There is also time required to measure and mark timber, harvest timber, skid out the logs and prepare them for sawing.  I spend as much time harvesting, skidding, and preparing the logs as I do sawing them.  I may be small, but I am fully integrated!

I saw primarily hardwood, the majority off of my timberland.  My strategy is to saw, air dry, and sell rough cut hardwood lumber for local woodworkers.  I am supplying a exclusive service because you cannot find hardwood lumber like walnut, oak, cherry, yellow poplar, and maple in this area.  I cut all thicknesses from 4/4 up to 16/4.  Lengths are 8 feet and 10 feet.  To date, my primary focus has been building furniture for family and friends, but the sawmill will allow me to increase the amount of custom furniture that I can build and sell.  This will be a growth area for me.

The sawmill allows me to gain significantly more value from my timberland than if I just offered the timber for sale to a logger or commercial sawmill.  For example, I can sell a large white oak on the stump as timber to a logger or mill, and it will be worth about $60 on the stump.  I can harvest the tree myself, saw it on the LT15, air dry the lumber, and sell the lumber from that tree for $700 - $800.  That is a huge lift in value that allows me to make a return from the timberland that I own and manage as well as a return on my sawmill and equipment investment.  It also allows me to offer lumber to local woodworkers that would otherwise have to drive two hours to Atlanta and pay high retail prices.

The Re-Sharp program is perfect for me.  I focus on high quality and not quantity, so sharpening my own blades would not be cost effective.  I have found the Re-sharp service to be outstanding in turn-around time and in blade quality.

It is amazing to me the lift that I can achieve in my timber investment on my 200 acres of property by sawing a high quality product and selling the product rather than just selling the timber.  The sawmill allows me to gain a lift over ten-fold more than the market value of the timber stumpage. 

I am going to expand the furniture side of my business.  Although small, I am happy with the volume of lumber at this point… it fits my property, equipment, and business strategy well.  I can make a little money and really enjoy what I am doing.  I get to meet all kinds of interesting people.  This creates a lot of exposure for the mill and most are interested in the process, and it allows me to brag on how great a product the mill is and the great service provided by Wood-Mizer.  And, believe me, I do brag! 

A Homesteader with a Sawmill

Building a Self-sufficient Farm and Home without the Lumberyard
by Kevin Kiwak, Wood-Mizer LT40 Super Hydraulic sawmill owner.

“Every wood element in the house – from the frame to the trim, doors, shelves, cabinets, you name it – was milled on the Wood-Mizer [sawmill]. One hundred percent of the wood in the house comes from my property and was processed on my mill.” Kevin Kiwak

"In the summer of 1993, I attended an introductory timber framing class at the Heartwood School in Beckett, Massachusetts. It was during that experience that two significant events occurred - I saw a Wood-Mizer portable sawmill for the first time and I made the acquaintance of Jack Sobon, the well-known timber frame architect and author. For the next decade, I dreamed of building my own house and starting a self-sufficient farm but circumstances always seemed to interfere. I purchased my Wood-Mizer LT40HD Super Remote [sawmill] in 2000 but it still would be another four years before Jack Sobon would design my house and I could chance leaving my career to pursue my dream.

The Learning Curve

"This is my first house, with little previous building experience other than my two weeks at the Heartwood School. It is my very first sawmilling experience. Admittedly, the learning curve was steep when I first started milling, but I soon found the machine design and operation to be intuitively obvious. Proficiency followed quickly. The house plan was taken from a 17th century French Country design. The French call it 'half-timbered,' that is, a timber frame with infill for the enclosure so that the frame remains exposed. I knew when I started the project that it would seem odd covering such a beautiful frame with siding or some other enclosure, so this was the perfect design solution. 

Timber Frame Construction

"As the frame is exposed it would require a rot-resistant species. Living in the Berkshires of western Massachusetts I was limited in choice- white oak, black cherry, and black locust being the available rot-resistant species. My property, quite fortuitously, was heavily populated with wild black cherry. The timbers are heartwood cherry on all exposed exterior surfaces. The wild cherry timbers were milled on my Wood-Mizer and then the frame was assembled using a scribing technique so as to be able to incorporate many unusual and curved members. After milling, not a single power tool was used in the construction of the house. For example, over 600 mortise and tenon joints were hand cut with a mallet and two inch framing chisel. From tree on the stump to assembled frame took the better part of two years. The entire project is now in its sixth year!

"The infill is autoclaved, aerated concrete block, chosen for its high R-value, covered with three coats of aged lime plaster both inside and out. The rafters, roof boards, floor joists, tower members, wane-edged siding, and exterior trim were all milled on the LT40. The interior timbers, also milled on my Wood-Mizer, are an assortment of species- beech, birch, red oak, hard and soft maple, sycamore, dawn redwood, eastern white pine, hemlock, cherry, and apple: in proportion to the timbers on the property, a formula devised by Jack Sobon. The wide variety of species used and the fact that milling occurred throughout the year (from 100 degrees in August to minus 15 degrees in February) required an assortment of sawmill blades. The Wood-Mizer technical staff was central to my sawmill blade education.

"The longest members in the frame are 34 foot 8x9 inch cross ties. The summer beam, cut from eastern white pine, measures 8x24 inches and is 16 feet long. The large hip roof and the other smaller roofs required some 32,000 shingles. These were made from knot-free, heartwood blocks of eastern white pine and milled using the shingle-maker attachment on my Wood-Mizer. I quickly discovered that shingle-making leaves a tremendous amount of ‘scrap’ wood which would generally be considered unusable, but with the Wood-Mizer I could turn even these scraps into valuable lumber.

Making it Work

"Every wood element in the house - from the frame to the trim, doors, shelves, cabinets, you name it - was milled on the LT40. One hundred percent of the wood in the house comes from my property and was processed on my mill. We are still working on the interior finish work on the house but starting this Fall I will begin a 35x50 foot 3-bay timber framed English barn. We would like to eventually house a pair of oxen – which we will use for logging in place of a tractor – in the future barn. All our present outbuildings - chicken coop, garden shed, sheep shed- were made using the Wood-Mizer. All future buildings – barn, bakehouse, and woodshed – will be built using the mill. We had a 6,000 square foot vegetable garden this year, in addition to which we grew broomcorn (for brooms!) and our own wheat. We dug a root cellar this summer and harvested 400 pounds of potatoes in the fall.

A New Horizon

"My Wood-Mizer sawmill has literally opened a new world to me. I am not restricted (financially, aesthetically, or imaginatively) by using a lumberyard or having another sawyer mill my elements. The possibilities seem limitless. For me, there is no turning back."

Kevin Kiwak with his Wood-Mizer LT40 Super Hydraulic portable sawmill

About Portable Sawmills

Small, affordable band sawmills have reduced or eliminated that reliance on box store lumber for thousands of people across North America. In the early 1980’s Wood-Mizer first came out with an affordable sawmill for the average Joe and self reliance for one’s own lumber suddenly became a possibility. Storm damaged timber is one of the most common reasons people first begin considering sawing their own lumber. They know that their trees are much more valuable than just being chopped up for firewood, and the idea of processing those trees into lumber is born.

About the Sawing Process

Wood-Mizer sawmills are based on a very simple, intuitive design. After a log is rolled onto the bed, and clamped firmly, the bandsaw blade is engaged, and the bandsaw head is pushed down the length of the log, sawing off a first board. Then the head is raised up, pulled back, and the whole process starts over again, and the boards begin stacking up. Boards can be stacked vertically on the sawmill, and edged to various desired widths in the same manner. Unlike convention circle sawmills, which remove 1/4” of wood each time the blade saws through the log, the Wood-Mizer ‘thin-kerf’ bandsaw blade removes less than a 1/10” of an inch. This increases the amount of material that each log can produce, and greatly reduces the amount of waste from the process. Hydraulic versions of these sawmills greatly reduce the amount of labor involved and increase production rates.

Studies on the Impact of using a Portable Sawmill

US Forest Service researcher Stephen Bratkovich, has reported that typical sawmills in the US operate at about 50% efficiency in terms of lumber recovery. In a study of a pallet lumber mill in Missouri, Bratkovich demonstrated 69% efficiency for a thin kerf mill with a .050" blade cutting thin lumber. "The US annual cut of timber for lumber products is equivalent to approximately 240 million trees," Bratkovich writes. "We could save the equivalent of 69 million trees annually if our recovery efficiency improved from 50% to 70% in our primary processing industry."


Learn more about portable sawmills and see more success stories at www.woodmizer.com or www.facebook.com/woodmizer. 

Forest Thinning made Profitable with a Wood-Mizer Portable Sawmill

Forest thinning increases overall forest health.

According to the USDA Forest Service, at least 40 million plus acres of southern and western forests in the United States are at high risk of catastrophic fire, insect infestation, or disease epidemics because of poor ecosystem health.  One reason has been lack of forest maintenance.  To bring the forests back to health, it is necessary to thin them by removing offending undergrowth and reduce overpopulations of smaller trees. Thinning not only has the potential to improve the overall health of the forests, it can also be a source of income for landowners and portable sawmill owners alike.  

Ken South of Jordan, Montana, is owner of K & K Sawing.  He works in private forests, harvesting small timber and converting it to lumber with his Wood-Mizer LT40 Super Hydraulic sawmill.  His operation can serve as a model of how thinning forests can be done at a profit without harvesting old growth timber.

Portable sawmills become key to profitable forest thinning

“I’d lost my job on a ranch when it went under… and needed something to do,” Ken explains.  “I’d operated a Wood-Mizer portable mill on the ranch and thought I saw something with a lot of potential.  We started custom sawing lumber to see if we could make a go of it and haven’t stopped since.”  

Fortunately for K & K Sawing, logging cutbacks on Federal lands have left some manufacturers scrambling for reliable supplies of quality fiber. Also, more and more private land owners are begining to treat their own forests for improved health and reduced fire threat.  The two needs, Ken points out, can be simultaneously fulfilled through thinning programs.

Often, hundreds of miles can separate the forests needing treatment from the nearest sawmill of any size.  That means transportation costs are high.  Ken South’s portable sawmill has proven to be the key in bringing supply and demand in a way that works. The Wood-Mizer, Ken points out, allows him to mill small timber into value added products only a few feet from where it is harvested, a vital factor in making the whole process economical when the timber is small and potential customers remote.  

Ken South's Wood-Mizer goes to the forest.

In a traditional harvest, costs are added at each stage of the process of logging.  And a thinning harvest often results in large quantities of small material which do not provide enough yield to make the whole process profitable.

With his Wood-Mizer portable mill, Ken South is able to avoid the production steps that add much of the cost between stump and secondary processor in a more traditional operation.  Since the cost of shipping a raw finished product from the woods is basically the same as transporting raw logs, shipment costs are reduced because only finished product, ready for secondary processing, leaves the woods. 

Ken and a contractor friend with logging equipment have worked out a split on the wood that allows each to operate a profitable business.  The contractor harvests the trees and delivers them to a central point at the saw.  The “landing” is changed periodically both to avoid ground damage and to reduce the amount of time and labor involved in harvesting the wood.

Trucking costs are greatly reduced. 

At the landing Ken, his son, and sometimes a third employee, prepare logs for sawing based on orders from buyers and saw to customer requests.  Cants are shipped to the buyer for reprocessing, lumber is sold to a variety of customers including local farmers and ranchers, wholesalers, and manufacturers, while slabs are used mostly for firewood.  Virtually everything goes into some kind of product.  Lumber destined for the primary customer is loaded onto a semi-trailer which is left at the site to be filled then picked up by a local trucker who delivers it to the customer’s mill in South Dakota, nearly 200 miles away.

The impacts on the forests are dramatic enough in terms of health and quality enhancements that neighboring ranchers have already asked Ken to work their forests when he’s done with his current project/location.  According to Ken, future work is already lined up, and he plans to continue making a good living improving both the economic and environmental health of the area near his home. 

Check out the Video Center at www.woodmizer.com to see more ways Wood-Mizer sawmill owners are using their sawmills to make a living. For more information on managing your private forest with a portable sawmill, visit: http://www.woodmizer.com/us/ResourceCenter/IndustrySolutions/ManagingYourPrivateForest.aspx