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Straight Line Rip Saw Choices

Started by YellowHammer, March 04, 2016, 12:02:51 AM

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WDH

I end up with short boards in furniture grade hardwood because sometimes you need to cut out a defect, or you may have to cut a bowed board into two shorter straight boards.  The key to getting the best price is to prepare the wood very well.  I am still working on doing a better job of this, and I recently put in a 12" jointer to help with crooked or bowed boards.
Woodmizer LT40HDD35, John Deere 2155, Kubota M5-111, Kubota L2501, Nyle L53 Dehumidification Kiln, and a passion for all things with leafs, twigs, and bark.  hamsleyhardwood.com

Magicman

 

 
All of these Ash 1X6's and 1X8's were 14' long when they went to my planer/T&G guy.   After straight line ripping, etc. they came back in various lengths.  Not a problem because lengths didn't matter with my flooring.   
Knothole Sawmill, LLC     '98 Wood-Mizer LT40SuperHydraulic   WM Million BF Club Member   WM Pro Sawyer Network

It's Weird being the Same Age as Old People

Never allow your "need" to make money to exceed your "desire" to provide quality service.....The Magicman

YellowHammer

Quote from: Peter Drouin on April 04, 2016, 06:40:59 AM
Looks good, I was surprised to see all the short wood in the pile. 8' is the shortest wood I sell. Do you put all the short wood in a pile, all mix kinds together?
Or put the short in with the long stuff in the same pile of the same kind of wood?
We cull and grade as we restock.  Every week, we take our planed but not graded packs of lumber and start re-stocking the shelves, species by species.  We go through a lot of wood every week, and as we reload the racks, we put all the rejects onto pallets and process them all in a mixed batch.  Hopefully we don't have many but sometimes we do. So it becomes a mixed species pallet (or pallets) that we take inside to clean up.  We clean everything to remove as many defects as possible, and only sell common grade of a few species, such as red oak, hickory and maple.  Everything else gets the premium "HHA" (Hobby Hardwood Alabama ;D)  grade as our customers say, which is basically a clean board with no knots.  Short boards sell fine, and 8 footers seem to be the longest most folks want to deal with on a routine basis.
Just this year I made a stack or two of 12 foot and 10 foot of a couple species (white oak and hard maple), and they sold much slower than 8 footers of the same species.  Also, since out boards are very clean, nobody wants to pay for a board with a knot or defect.  So we trim them out.  Basically we take a FAS board and instead of having the customer visualizing the clear wood in the board, we do the trimming and get the clear wood of the boards and only sell that.  So I have the advantage that as I'm sawing, I can try to optimize the grade, real time, as I know how I'm going to trim.  Its an interesting market, and most of the people I deal with, although many are professional furniture makers and woodworkers, don't care about the nuances of grade, they want dead clear wood and are willing to pay for it.
We had the ripsaw up a running for a couple weeks now, and better than half of the customers have started asking us to straight line the boards before they leave.  We charge 50 cents per bdft for two edges, and which may be about what, or maybe half of what we paid for some of the logs to begin with.  So the simple act of straight lining the finished boards brings significant profit margin and also makes the customer happy.
       
YellowHammerisms:

Take steps to save steps.

If it won't roll, its not a log; it's still a tree.  Sawmills cut logs, not trees.

Kiln drying wood: When the cookies are burned, they're burned, and you can't fix them.

Sawing is fun for the first couple million boards.

Be smarter than the sawdust

WDH

Some of the lower grade, knottier boards sell better if you leave the live edge, but in many cases, there is not much you can do about low grade except to try and not saw it. 
Woodmizer LT40HDD35, John Deere 2155, Kubota M5-111, Kubota L2501, Nyle L53 Dehumidification Kiln, and a passion for all things with leafs, twigs, and bark.  hamsleyhardwood.com

4x4American

Very interesting, YH.  So..opening up logs on the WM is just a small part of what you do huh
Boy, back in my day..

YellowHammer

Quote from: 4x4American on April 05, 2016, 10:16:33 PM
Very interesting, YH.  So..opening up logs on the WM is just a small part of what you do huh

Yes, everything from cutting logs from our own farm, me buying and trucking logs from anyone who has high enough quality, sawing them, stacking the lumber, air drying, running 3 kilns (really 2 1/2), planing (and outsourcing a good bit of that, I hate planing :D), trimming boards, restocking shelves, and of course the retail sales on Saturdays where we routinely have people drive from hundreds of miles and many states away.  We saw for the sole purpose of keeping our kilns full, as we can't produce enough lumber to keep up with demand.  I try to control every phase of the operation, and it starts with good logs and a sawmill. 
YellowHammerisms:

Take steps to save steps.

If it won't roll, its not a log; it's still a tree.  Sawmills cut logs, not trees.

Kiln drying wood: When the cookies are burned, they're burned, and you can't fix them.

Sawing is fun for the first couple million boards.

Be smarter than the sawdust

tule peak timber

persistence personified - never let up , never let down

thechknhwk

I'm green with envy as I'm in the middle of processing 12' pieces of ash into 1500 sq ft of hardwood flooring for my upstairs.  My first straight edge is with a makita track saw then I'll run the other side thru the table saw.

Peter Drouin

A&P saw Mill LLC.
45' of Wood Mizer, cutting since 1987.
License NH softwood grader.

OneWithWood

Quote from: thechknhwk on April 06, 2016, 11:42:45 AM
I'm green with envy as I'm in the middle of processing 12' pieces of ash into 1500 sq ft of hardwood flooring for my upstairs.  My first straight edge is with a makita track saw then I'll run the other side thru the table saw.

If you joint one edge you will not need the track saw. 
I am assuming you have a jointer to set up for the planer.
One With Wood
LT40HDG25, Woodmizer DH4000 Kiln

thechknhwk

I know it is not the proper way to truly flatten boards, but I plane them all first.  The track saw is way faster than the jointer for getting the first straight edge.

YellowHammer

This weekend we were running the planer and the SLR at the same time, making lots of chips.  It was cold and dry outside, which is great for building up static electricity and after a short time I started hearing a loud "pop."  It sounded just like an electric fence arc, and sure enough, up in the corner of the barn, right where the plastic dust collector pipe takes a bend pretty close to a metal wire tie, I see about an inch long blue flame spark crackle across the gap.  A few minutes more, I see it again.  I'd always heard that plastic dust collector pipe could lead to sparks, but....  Good news is that I'm very careful about not letting sawdust build up on the rafters, so there was nothing to spark into a fire. 

So today I spent a good deal of the evening replacing the plastic pipe with metal.  Here it is about midway through the process. 
YellowHammerisms:

Take steps to save steps.

If it won't roll, its not a log; it's still a tree.  Sawmills cut logs, not trees.

Kiln drying wood: When the cookies are burned, they're burned, and you can't fix them.

Sawing is fun for the first couple million boards.

Be smarter than the sawdust

jueston

there are those who believe you can ground an insulator(plastic) by wrapping wire around it and grounding the wire...

my personal experience has convinced me to just use metal pipe since plastic always always always shocks me....

and my hair looks better laying flat then spiky from the static anyways....  :)

Kbeitz

All dust collectors should have A dust collector braded grounding wire KIT.
This wire goes inside the plastic pipe...



 



 

Collector and builder of many things.
Love machine shop work
and Wood work shop work
And now a saw mill work

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