Mill Log Scaling Question

[g_man]

I have only sold saw logs ( eastern spruce/fir ) to one mill because he is close and I can only ship about 500 bf loads in my small truck. So it takes lots of trips. If I look at any of my scale tally sheets I can see he scales the logs as if they are in one inch icrements. Always rounding down of course. So a 12.75" log gets scaled as 12". I thought that this was just the way life is.
Today I was playing with the bf calculator in the tool box you have on this sight and noticed that fractions of an inch are used in the bf calculation of saw logs. This made me wonder if some mills do the same and credit fractions of an inch.
To be fair most of my logs are small. In the 7" to 12" dia range and 10' or 12' long.
So there is not a lot of loss per log. But the loss would add up over time if most other mills included fractions. Just wondering.

[bill m]

A good scaler will measure the end of the log across the smallest and largest sides and average them. If it's a nice straight log with no crook or sweep they might round up to the next inch. The bad part about your logs is they are on the small size. Not the most optimum size for most mills. Also do they pay you a premium for delivering the logs or is it the same price as on the landing? Even if they are paying more see if it worth your time to continue delivering. Most times with a small truck it is not worth it. My truck holds about 1500 bd. ft. and a mill is less than 10 miles from most of my jobs and it still is not worth it for me to do the trucking.

[Ron Wenrich]

The calculators can measure fractions of an inch, but your scaler may not.  Its pretty much up to the scaler.  Most mills don't use fractions, but they will round up, especially on nicer logs. 

I know when I was scaling logs, we had the footage number on our scale stick.  We wrote down the footage, not the diameter.  I could deduct for sweep, rot, and other defect at the time of scaling without having to adjust later on.

[Okrafarmer]

I used to haul small pickup loads of 8 and 10' logs to the mill-- the only reason I did it was because I had to get rid of them anyway, and I hated to waste them. I was paid to remove trees-- and had to do something with them. One sawmill was kind to me. Now I remember them gracefully with bigger business opportunities and great word-of-mouth advertising.

[chevytaHOE5674]

Where I scale if its a perfect log I may round up to a 13" if its actually say a 12.6". If its a small log or has any defect then I round down to the lower footage as there will be less yield from that log (so that crummy 12.6" now scales at a 12"). Then of course if the log has lots of sweep/crook/rot/defect/etc you can deduct from the footage of the log as well (say your log with 40 feet in it now was scaled back to 30 feet because of sweep). As the markets have gotten tighter so have the instances of "rounding up" to the next inch class for a log (unfortunate for the sellers).