Looking to start a 25,000 to 50,000 MBF per day sawmill

[blyons11]

Let me start out by saying I'm a crazy entrepreneur and have started multiple successful businesses without industry knowledge...I'm very ignorant in this space but In assessing the current lumber prices, I can not be convinced that timber is being bought, sawn, dried and sold for a cost basis no more than 40 cents per MBF but the market is paying 85-90 cents currently that I believe will be the new norm price going forward after a spike to 1.5-$2 in 2022. My plan is to provide about 15,000 MBF to myself each day and panel frame with it for our tract home business.


Am being sold on a Wravor 1250 line that feeds to a multi ripsaw. I'm only looking to sell dimensional lumber 2x4s and 2x6s mostly providing to myself for the tract home building operation we are running. Finding the kiln is the easy part ...the planer mill making sure I'm buying the right sawmill has been a challenge.

From what I can see online a hurdle saw mill feeding a brewco resaw is being advertised as 20-30mbf per shift. The rep at Wravor is telling me with the below set up I can accomplish the same thing, basically that I can cut a 20" x 16' pine in 2-3 minutes slabbed and few to a Wravor 750 resaw straight into 2 x 4s and 2x 6s.

https://youtu.be/WZxUBYVVAps

Does it sound like a ridiculous assumption? My budget for mill, kiln and planning mill is around 1.5mm. It's imperative I get 25,000 MBF per shift but I'd like to see if I could accomplish 50,000 if possible. It seems like anything over the 25,000 per shift range is custom built tho and you can't just by it online like hurdle, woodmizer or Wravor

All help welcomed!!

[Jeff]

Thats a lot of imperative logs.

[Magicman]

I didn't see anything as demonstrated that was going to saw/handle ~300 logs per day much less per shift.

[stavebuyer]

I helped a man build a Heartwood Horizontal (6") band mill and resaw into a 30k mbf per shift operation sawing 4/4 grade hardwoods. The video you posted appears to be demonstrating the features rather than the production potential as it is almost in slow motion relative to what rate a saw that size and cost would be operating at to reach 30k feet per shift.

Re-saw is the key to production and kerf savings. The most bang for the $$ spent is a Hurdle circle feeding a 2" band resaw. 

The biggest problem with the intermediate bandsaws is once you start getting above 2 inches or so you a need saw filing room and saw filer which is no small task.

The Hurdle and resaw combo is a proven moderate cost 30K concept in 4/4 hardwood and would do that or more easily in pine dimension lumber.

Running at 30K per shift you also will need multiple trucks/loaders and waste handling systems in place and 30 to 90 days log inventory. I think the overall cost to run an operation of that scale would be several times higher than your proposed budget.

[Southside]

Come over to my place. I can bring you to a SYP mill producing about double your top end production. If I remember correctly their build budget was just under $65 million back in 2008. Chase called their note maybe 60 days post start up and they went around looking for capital. They did it and now have over $100 million into the facility. 

[longtime lurker]

What you first need to establish is what the log supply is: Species, size, grade. An efficient sawline starts with having equipment that is suited to the resource. With that budget... maybe. Not the equipment it's the land + buildings + electricity + legislative compliance. You're at a size where you can't cut corners like us bottom feeders.

In sawmills cash does not come in one hand and out the other, there's a time lag between buying logs and selling lumber and you can't expect to not pay the costs while it's happening.  I'd suggest you calculate 25000 per day at 40 cents per, for 120 days just to get an idea of what your working cash requirements are if it's all going smoothly.

Like most businesses it seldom runs smoothly. I've been struggling against the working cash requirement issue for years, it's a tough one... there are times my saws are barely running because I can't afford to turn them on until something else sells, and if the saws aren't running today there's no money coming in 4 months ahead. It's a vicious cycle and I'm established with a customer base, buying your own product will alleviate that for a bit, but not long because part of sawing the product you want is sawing the product you don't want, you'll get along great for a bit then find you've got 10 cents in the bank and a million bucks worth of feedstock, survey pegs and pallet material in the yard. Been there too. 

What I've just written up there all cost money to learn... and blood, sweat, tears, years of my life, and a marriage. If you want to go in at that size you need a bigger budget.

[WV Sawmiller]

  Where do you plan to set up this operation and obtain the labor and logs? If not in Europe I'd be concerned about maintenance spares availability. Very good point about the saw filing room, equipment and operator.

  The one helper in the video looks to be younger than some Amish kids I've seen working around their parents farms and mills.

  Nice looking equipment but I sure did not see the kinds of production you are describing and if you did you'd sure have to have some outside crews in addition to the proposed 4 man crew described by the video.

[OwenOren]

What you first need to establish is what the log supply is: Species, size, grade. An efficient sawline starts with having equipment that is suited to the resource. With that budget... maybe. Not the equipment it's the land + buildings + electricity + legislative compliance. You're at a size where you can't cut corners like us bottom feeders.

In sawmills cash does not come in one hand and out the other, there's a time lag between buying logs and selling lumber and you can't expect to not pay the costs while it's happening.  I'd suggest you calculate 25000 per day at 40 cents per, for 120 days just to get an idea of what your working cash requirements are if it's all going smoothly.

Like most businesses it seldom runs smoothly. I've been struggling against the working cash requirement issue for years, it's a tough one... there are times my saws are barely running because I can't afford to turn them on until something else sells, and unless the saws are running today they aren't making money 6 months out. It's a vicious cycle and I'm established with a customer base  Buying your own product will alleviate that for a bit, but not long because part of sawing the product you want is sawing the product you don't want, you'll get along great for a bit then find you've got 10 cents in the bank and a million bucks worth of feedstock, survey pegs and pallet material in the yard. Been there too.

What I've just written up there all cost money to learn... and blood, sweat, tears, years of my life, and a marriage. If you want to go in at that size you need a bigger budget, just read my tagline.

Agree completely on the very first bit. Log supply. You need that nailed down - contracts or something to guarantee you never overpay market prices. Logs will be 70%+ of your COGs and getting that first assumption wrong is business ending. 
Where are you based? I'm in northern Europe and can tell you that that log supply is not easy to get consistently in Germany or Norway unless you enter the "big" league. 

[OwenOren]

I run a mill in northern Europe.

We have one of wravor's competitor Slovenian mills which is let's say is "semi" auto - it has a website refering to 28m3/~10MBf (of logs per 8hr shift). We have all the additions to get to supposedly that number (log deck, hydraulics, outfeed conveyor to waste, product and a semi auto stacker) - even when cutting large spruces in large dimensions we can't get to anywhere above 95% of that number quoted at a run rate for more than a couple of hours.

We don't need to get to that number because we run the mill for quality chalet beams, but out of curiosity we have run it as hard as we could before. Still couldn't get near the number quoted for a full shift.

Say we tried to get to 80% of that number consistently - there would always be "something" that would cause a stoppage. Snowfall, delays in log delivery, power outages, mechanical parts needing fedexing. Unlike most on this forum, labour is the least of our issues (reliable, unionised, educated, sober) - they relished the challenge and worked like horses.

Budget

Back of the envelope I'd suggest a budget of more like $5-10mn is needed for this at the low end. That assumes a well prepared site and no auxiliary spending. 

I think in your first paragraph you note that pricing Vs cash costs would imply profitability - but the misery of this industry is the capital investment costs to get the point of being able to achieve those cash costs is horrifying. I don't not know of an industry with such a high pre-production capex to in production opex (ex log cost) ratio. Production is cheap, once you have a massive mill with lots of bells and whistles...

My personal experience, as an engineer, accountant and a business owner is that the returns on sawmills are really hard work. The capital investment is huge and the variability in profits due to it being a process industry where your key input and ouput prices are rarely within your control... So all you can do is keep process efficiency and be willing to halt production in bad times.

My advice would be to get a turnkey operation designed and priced by one of the big players for midscale sawmills, from log through to reprocessing. Kara or similar in the Nordics do such things.

I'd be very curious about where this is planned for.

[SawyerTed]

I have spent the last 10 months designing a sawmill much like described.  I hate to break it to you to be competitive you will need closer to 8 times $1.5 million just to build the sawmill, plus the kilns, plus the planer mill plus buildings, plus wiring just to be in the ballpark of 25 MBFT per shift. 

If my calculations are correct 25 MBFT will require 125 logs averaging 16" SED 16' long per shift. I suspect more like 150 logs.  That's 15-20 logs per hour.  If 8' logs double all that. 

A Hurdle will have to run flat out top speed 100% of 8 hours to make 25,000 board feet. Running that hard, it will last as long as it is designed to last.  A Hurdle is a good mill but it's not designed for long term production at that level for many years. Then there are edgers and resaws required. 

There's not a bed style band sawmill that can make those production numbers. Vertical bands or circles are the way to go.

An overhead end dogging carriage feeding a twin band or twin circle saw with vertical edgers is the way to go.  Feed the cants to a gang then boards to a trim saw and you are done.  To recover boards from the slabs a horizontal resaw needs to worked in. 

Even a 100 MBFT kiln will still create a bottle neck.  Our location has 4 50 MBFT kilns and two 90 MBFT kilns. It wasn't enough for the mill that's was here. 

After kiln drying, there's a planer mill.  A 25 MBFT planer mill to dress framing lumber is also "doable" with the right machinery.  The planer mill is its own set of machines, material handling etc

Labor?  Less automation equals less money in machinery equals more people required.  That's a tough way to try to run a sawmill these days. 

Do you have a building for the sawmill, covered air drying area, planer mill building?  The buildings alone are $300,000 EACH if you have to put them up.  Then there's electrical wiring costs, three phase machines will take &40,000 minimum to wire EACH assuming you have the :phase transformers sitting there.

$1.5 million won't touch what you need to be competitive in the framing lumber business. Even being your own supplier to your construction company, production costs will make your lumber more expensive.

[YellowHammer]

To do all that, just move the decimal over a notch or two just to get started.

I buy a lot of logs from a 40,000 bdft per shift hardwood sawmill and also a place that does 2 milliton bdft per year.  I can only tell you what I see every week, knowing then and watching their operation, for over 10 years.  

The cost of the sawmill is not only the dominant expense of a big league operation.  Even if it was, I wouldn't do anything that isn't conventional, because in limited net profit production sawmills, evolution to optimization is an every day fact.  Use what works, and don't reinvent the wheel.

Both places have their own dedicated logging crews and trucks, as well as many hot shots.  Both have their own motor pool to keep all their many, many millions of dollars of equipment running.  For example, you will need several $150K JD544 Wheel Loaders or equivalent, one to unload the trucks and sort logs logs and one to feed the debarker and sawmill.  Both of these places have 4 of them, there goes a third of your budget right there.  Then add in a half a dozen $100,000 log trucks, trailers, several skitters, skidders, a couple dozers, mulch trucks, tub grinders, office spaces, work spaces, kilns, a few forklifts for the kins, etc and you are well up and over the 20 million mark without hiring any heavy labor, office employees, timber cruisers, or acquisition personnel.  Plus a road trucking fleet to deliver your product, because if you rely soley on contract trucking, the guy down the road just decided to pay them an extra 10 cents a mile and you are high and dry without a truck in sight.    

If you think you can do it without full dedicated logging crews working for you, that is a mistake.  I have a very small operation and can't rely on contract loggers to feed me.  You must have a core of loggers on your salary to at least try to keep you in logs, despite the rain, the cold, equipment failures, the mill down the road paying 5 cents more per ton,or or they are just plain mad at you.

In order to keep loggers fed, you must have access to lots and lots of land.  High ground when it rains in the winter, low ground for the dry months in the summer.

Don't forget the 50 acres of properly zones land you'll need for your own facility, plus a million dollars in 3 phase installation costs.

Kilns cost big money to build and to operate in a production environment.  Call up a kiln company and price out a ready made, production softwood kiln.  It'll be a quick few million just in kilns to produce 15MBF per week.  Not to mention the support equipment and staff.

[longtime lurker]

Agree completely on the very first bit. Log supply. You need that nailed down - contracts or something to guarantee you never overpay market prices. Logs will be 70%+ of your COGs and getting that first assumption wrong is business ending.
Where are you based? I'm in northern Europe and can tell you that that log supply is not easy to get consistently in Germany or Norway unless you enter the "big" league.

Australia.  The big issue I've found is not logs but loggers... I am not big enough to interest the reliable logging contractors and the one thing worse than no logger is an unreliable logger. That has been the very hard lesson of last few years, and it's hurting me again now. But I will survive, grow vertically, and come out the other side.
I see nothing but trouble by becoming "big" Behind this boom the industry will crash and when it crashes it will only be the best in class mega processors, and the best in class smaller operations who survive. The guys who are just "big" go down every time. That works for me...

[moodnacreek]

Even if the sawmill and resaw can do it the logs have to come in and the sawn stuff has to go out. This is a big deal and when prices drop the competition that survived the last recession could be faster and cheaper.

[blyons11]

This is really good feedback, I appreciate these opinions. I know this is accomplishable more concerned with input regarding HOW it could be done vs why it won't get done.

From what I've gathered on the above - a Hurdle saw mill seems to be the consensus? The land and facility I'm not concerned about, I believe that will be the least challenging part.

Hurdle Heavy weight - Brewco 1600 resaw? What would good options be for planer mills - are we pretty much assuming that used is going to be the only option? I found some new kiln dries online for 110k from ex factory.com for 20kmbf (are those just terrible options)?

Lastly, the the true production I would need is only about 15 MBF per day - that's about 7500 per house for average 1600 sf house. I was thinking it would be nice to produce excess and have opportunity to scale - if the goal is 15000 MBF per shift vs 25-50k, does this seem less crazy to everyone reading this?

Also, I'm in the triad of NC if anyone wants to collaborate!

[blyons11]

Even if the sawmill and resaw can do it the logs have to come in and the sawn stuff has to go out. This is a big deal and when prices drop the competition that survived the last recession could be faster and cheaper.

True but I'd just be taking the lumber next door to our own panel framing line

[blyons11]

I run a mill in northern Europe.

We have one of wravor's competitor Slovenian mills which is let's say is "semi" auto - it has a website refering to 28m3/~10MBf (of logs per 8hr shift). We have all the additions to get to supposedly that number (log deck, hydraulics, outfeed conveyor to waste, product and a semi auto stacker) - even when cutting large spruces in large dimensions we can't get to anywhere above 95% of that number quoted at a run rate for more than a couple of hours.

We don't need to get to that number because we run the mill for quality chalet beams, but out of curiosity we have run it as hard as we could before. Still couldn't get near the number quoted for a full shift.

Say we tried to get to 80% of that number consistently - there would always be "something" that would cause a stoppage. Snowfall, delays in log delivery, power outages, mechanical parts needing fedexing. Unlike most on this forum, labour is the least of our issues (reliable, unionised, educated, sober) - they relished the challenge and worked like horses.

Budget

Back of the envelope I'd suggest a budget of more like $5-10mn is needed for this at the low end. That assumes a well prepared site and no auxiliary spending.

I think in your first paragraph you note that pricing Vs cash costs would imply profitability - but the misery of this industry is the capital investment costs to get the point of being able to achieve those cash costs is horrifying. I don't not know of an industry with such a high pre-production capex to in production opex (ex log cost) ratio. Production is cheap, once you have a massive mill with lots of bells and whistles...

My personal experience, as an engineer, accountant and a business owner is that the returns on sawmills are really hard work. The capital investment is huge and the variability in profits due to it being a process industry where your key input and ouput prices are rarely within your control... So all you can do is keep process efficiency and be willing to halt production in bad times.

My advice would be to get a turnkey operation designed and priced by one of the big players for midscale sawmills, from log through to reprocessing. Kara or similar in the Nordics do such things.

I'd be very curious about where this is planned for.

This is really helpful - sorry 1.5mm was just for the equipment, not the land and buildings.
I got quoted a Wravor 1250 w a 750 multi rip and hydraulics , operator cab etc for 600k…seemed like a decent deal. Knowing that you’re getting roughly 10k MBF per shift, do you think averaging 15k Is more doable with a Wravor 1250. I was thinking if I went straight to 20” softwoods and ran 6 inch cants after slabbing through the resaw I could get the logs through in 6 or so cuts.

Lastly, the published rate on Wravors website is I think 24k MBF per 8 hour shift -  are you saying that 80% of that is probably more in-line with what to expect…or do you think even that is too aggressive?

[Dave Shepard]

I've watched a lot of high production dimensional mills on YouTube. Some sort of scragg or end dogging mill is used to knock the first two slabs off, then the cant goes into a resaw. Carriage type mills seem to be more for hardwood grade break down, not high production softwoods. This is just observation, so take it for what it's worth. Being the fourth largest sawmill in my county sounds impressive, until you find out there are only four sawmills in my county. :D

[YellowHammer]

It's the first of the year, my New Years resolution is to be nice, so I deleted my post and will only say "good luck."

However, as a general rule, when someone gets input from professional sawmill operators and owners from all over the world, who have no agenda other than to help, it's probably a good idea to listen.

[Ricker]

You got the money to buy equipment that is available.  But to find as many decent sawlogs you are going to need and it does not sound like you are currently involved with the local logging community is going to be a problem.  Have all the equipment and the help you want but no logs and it all comes to a halt.  That's when it gets expensive.

[Dave Shepard]

I wonder how many of the sawmills currently operating at high production rates were built to run at that level versus started out small and grew to that size. I would think that after spending 15 or 20 million to get your physical plant operational, you'd probably want another 5 in cash or line of credit to pay the bills until everthing settles down. 

[Southside]

Fancy, glossy, brochures from equipment manufacturers look great, but they don't pay the bills.  For the production you are talking about - at least in the beginning of this - you really would be into a chip and saw operation and likely curve sawing technology in order to keep the margins necessary, so move the decimal point.  It's all about log yield.  The next issue is all the residuals. You will need a debarker, and the means to handle all the material that will generate.  You will need a hog or chipper, along with collection for bark, chips, sawdust, and shavings.  You are not going to get all 2x material from your logs - well you can but forget about log optimization.  So what is your market for the 1" material?  You are not going to get 2x stamped material out of the juvenile wood sawing SYP - that will go into the PT world as 6x's and such.  So now you need to build a treatment plant, or plan on selling it to your competition for lower than the cost of their production.  What are you going to do with all the 2x material that doesn't make grade?  How are you going to heat the kilns?  Presuming you plan to burn some of your residual then you need a boiler.

Your idea of only buying 20" logs - ummm, shop that around to some logging outfits.  You are in SYP plantation country, believe it or not those 20" small end logs are getting harder to find, and finding 50MBF a day?  

Not trying to burst your bubble here but 2x SYP is a commodity product, and by definition is basically break even with the margins being made on volume.  There is no value to add to it. Nobody is going to care where a stamped #2 stud comes from, the only thing they look at in the lumber packet is the price, and if yours are $0.50 more than any other mill you won't be moving them.    

I wish you the best with your endeavor, but if you were standing here I would seriously encourage you to visit a number of sawmills and see how many people are there, how much equipment is there, and how much capitol is actually tied up in them so you don't walk into things unprepared. 

[longtime lurker]

The Hurdle consensus has been developed in a vacuum - you still haven't given any input into what your log resource is in terms of species size and grade. So a Hurdle may or may not be right for your logs. They're a fast tie mill by design, and they have limitations.
Ted suggested an overhead end dogging carriage fed twin. That will run rings around a Hurdle and would be the way I'd lean if you've got the right logs for it.
There's 2 guys posting here familiar with 6" bands - again it may be an option, if you've got the right type of logs. You start running them you're going to need a full debarker at least as fast as the headsaw, and that only works to keep the outside the logs clean. Any pipe and it's a fail.
One of those guys is saying look at the Kara system or similar... again in the right logs it's a winner.

In another life - well lets just say I know my way around the heavy equipment business and this quote here "I think in your first paragraph you note that pricing Vs cash costs would imply profitability - but the misery of this industry is the capital investment costs to get the point of being able to achieve those cash costs is horrifying. I don't not know of an industry with such a high pre-production capex to in production opex (ex log cost) ratio. Production is cheap, once you have a massive mill with lots of bells and whistles...

My personal experience, as an engineer, accountant and a business owner is that the returns on sawmills are really hard work. The capital investment is huge and the variability in profits due to it being a process industry where your key input and ouput prices are rarely within your control... So all you can do is keep process efficiency and be willing to halt production in bad times."   is really really worth paying attention to. This is not earthmoving or construction - when you start sawing framing your business has to be globally competitive not just locally. The current price you pay for pine framing isn't set by the mill down the road it's set by the 50 largest sawlines in the world most of which aren't even in your country, much less your county. You just don't realise it... but that mill down the road only stays afloat because of the road freight & distribution component of the lumber price compared to his competitor buying pine in New Zealand, processing in Guangzhou and freighting it around the world. The current high lumber prices are only because of shipping bottlenecks in the global supply chain, and they won't be there forever.

That said - yes, a 15000 a day mill is a lot more achievable. To hit 25-50 mBF a day you need either a serious piece of equipment like a R200 or R250 Hewsaw or you're running with somebody elses castoffs and they cast them off for a reason you'll soon enough discover next downturn when you're trying to compete with that R250 Hewsaw.  Sawlines aren't like heavy equipment... you don't just send a D10 when the D8's not big enough, the entire system has to be sized to suit. Your production will always be limited by the slowest component of the system so they need to integrate well.

However there are quite a few systems that can do 12-15 mBF a day that are competitive and efficient. They wont compete with the inline quad canter class operation, but they'll be viable when the older type big sawline has gone under.

Newman Whitney double roughing planer is the machine you want in the planer mill. Theres a few others, but they're all variations on that theme.

[SawyerTed]

If it could be done for $1.5 million and produce framing lumber that is competitive with the large commercial mills, there would have been a dozen mills pop up here in the Piedmont in the last year. That's not been the case.  In fact some in the region have closed their doors 

As has been shared here, there's more to it than buying a head rig that will saw X amount in Y time. Just the lead time on machinery is too far out to bet on the price of lumber today.  

I concur Good Luck. 

[blyons11]

The Hurdle consensus has been developed in a vacuum - you still haven't given any input into what your log resource is in terms of species size and grade. So a Hurdle may or may not be right for your logs. They're a fast tie mill by design, and they have limitations.
Ted suggested an overhead end dogging carriage fed twin. That will run rings around a Hurdle and would be the way I'd lean if you've got the right logs for it.
There's 2 guys posting here familiar with 6" bands - again it may be an option, if you've got the right type of logs. You start running them you're going to need a full debarker at least as fast as the headsaw, and that only works to keep the outside the logs clean. Any pipe and it's a fail.
One of those guys is saying look at the Kara system or similar... again in the right logs it's a winner.

In another life - well lets just say I know my way around the heavy equipment business and this quote here "I think in your first paragraph you note that pricing Vs cash costs would imply profitability - but the misery of this industry is the capital investment costs to get the point of being able to achieve those cash costs is horrifying. I don't not know of an industry with such a high pre-production capex to in production opex (ex log cost) ratio. Production is cheap, once you have a massive mill with lots of bells and whistles...

My personal experience, as an engineer, accountant and a business owner is that the returns on sawmills are really hard work. The capital investment is huge and the variability in profits due to it being a process industry where your key input and ouput prices are rarely within your control... So all you can do is keep process efficiency and be willing to halt production in bad times."   is really really worth paying attention to. This is not earthmoving or construction - when you start sawing framing your business has to be globally competitive not just locally. The current price you pay for pine framing isn't set by the mill down the road it's set by the 50 largest sawlines in the world most of which aren't even in your country, much less your county. You just don't realise it... but that mill down the road only stays afloat because of the road freight & distribution component of the lumber price compared to his competitor buying pine in New Zealand, processing in Guangzhou and freighting it around the world. The current high lumber prices are only because of shipping bottlenecks in the global supply chain, and they won't be there forever.

That said - yes, a 15000 a day mill is a lot more achievable. To hit 25-50 mBF a day you need either a serious piece of equipment like a R250 Hewsaw or you're running with somebody elses castoffs and they cast them off for a reason you'll soon enough discover next downturn when you're trying to compete with that R250 Hewsaw.  Sawlines aren't like heavy equipment... you don't just send a D10 when the D8's not big enough, the entire system has to be sized to suit. Your production will always be limited by the slowest component of the system so they need to integrate well.

However there are quite a few systems that can do 12-15 mBF a day that are competitive and efficient. They wont compete with the R250 Hewsaw class operation, but they'll be viable when the older type big sawline has gone under.

Newman Whitney double roughing planer is the machine you want in the planer mill. Theres a few others, but they're all variations on that theme.

Thanks for the feedback.
Sorry the economics are as follows : pine can be bought in our market consistently over the last 10 years and foreseeable future for $30 per ton. Let's assume am increase to $40 per ton. From what I've gathered your are looking at 4-5 tons per 1000 MBF. That puts us at roughly 15-20cents per MBF for raw logs.
I could give you a whole spreadsheet but let's just assume I'm in the ballpark of cutting, drying and planing for another 20-25 cents per MBF. That puts us in the 40-50 cents range for retail what is going right now for 90 cent per MBF.
Understanding that there are only a handful of players that set the market, my assumption is that prices will fluctuate between 1 and $2 per 1000mbf through out 2022 but I do believe prices will stabilize at 80-90 cents when it all shakes out.
That being said we are in SYP and SPF territory and I have a couple relationships with guys who already cut raw land for us in the siteworks business who have indicated they would happily cut on a contract basis- I'm also scoping out a few tracts to put timber options on. Understanding yes, that will be difficult but I feel confident in the ability to lock in 6-12 months worth of product.
My plans for waste was to chip and dye it brown to use as mulch in our neighborhoods, am also exploring wood fiber erosion production as we currently spend a lot of money on straw wattles and straw blankets.
The end goal would be to provide 15000 MBF to ourselves a day (250 days per year) at 50 cents per vs buying it from builders first source or whomever. We would then panel frame our starter homes in a factory and send to a job site.
It seems like the biggest concern on the site is generally the availability of logs, which I appreciate but I do think with timber contracts and the few solid relationships I have that will be enough to get from A to B. I'm much more concerned I drop a lot of money on equipment that can't produce what I was hoping it would. The production numbers for 15000 MBF on the Wravor 1250 seem to be doable but vendors lie all the time so am trying to verify somehow. I have not talked to anyone at hurdle so that would be my next step.

[blyons11]

If it could be done for $1.5 million and produce framing lumber that is competitive with the large commercial mills, there would have been a dozen mills pop up here in the Piedmont in the last year. That's not been the case.  In fact some in the region have closed their doors

As has been shared here, there's more to it than buying a head rig that will saw X amount in Y time. Just the lead time on machinery is too far out to bet on the price of lumber today.  

I concur Good Luck.

Sorry yea, 1.5mm was just for the equipment, not land building etc.
You're in Germanton not too far from me , what are you seeing regarding availability  of pines 16" on your end. The answer I keep running into is that if "you're willing to pay" they're out there