Why are mills so far from the trees?

[David B]

In the southwest it seems the trees are up in the mountains and the mills are down in the valleys. Lot of wasted trucking it seems. Can commercial sawmills not be semi trailer mounted like a giant wood mizer?

[Ljohnsaw]

But it's all down hill, so it's all free.  ;)

[beenthere]

In the southwest it seems the trees are up in the mountains and the mills are down in the valleys. Lot of wasted trucking it seems. Can commercial sawmills not be semi trailer mounted like a giant wood mizer?

:D :D :D
Are you for real, or just from CA ???

[Ianab]

This is a modern commercial sawmill.

Google Maps

It's not exactly portable, and includes a 28 mW co-gen plant. But you can see the size of the place, although there is a lot more going on than just a sawmill. Kilns / treatment / wood pulp etc.

This is a smaller local mill, about as small as it's economic to run these days. But you can still see the size of the overall site.

Google Maps

A reasonably productive mill can be made portable, but all the support equipment and the site itself is more difficult. In days past mills were actually designed to be "transportable", that is they could be broken down and moved to a new site in a couple of days. Log that area for a few months, then pick up and move a mile further down the line and repeat. But with modern machinery / roads / trucks it's just more efficient to bring the logs to a central location with all the facilities on site.

[twar]

Lot of wasted trucking it seems.

The products and by-products of the mill also have to be trucked. Speaking from observation and not from experience, logs can be stacked or even scattered about until the weather allows them to be brought to the mill on an open logging truck. Once cut, however, everything is sorted, graded, stickered. covered and even packaged for delivery. All of that would be a pain out in the woods here in Norway (think West Va's topography with S. Alaska's latitude and climate).

[customsawyer]

The mills already cut the trees close to them.  ;D

[Magicman]

Got any level places for the sawmill in the mountains?  Then you have to load and haul all of the lumber down the same distance.  Lumber handling would be a nightmare.

[charles mann]

It would be safe to say, just from Ca, which explains it.

[B.C.C. Lapp]

Back in the day that is what they did. The mills and logging camps were built where the timber was or as close as possible.  But then it was all huge tracks of timber that took years to cut off.   Now a piece with 200,000 bdft is big.

However, here in Pa there are some guys taking the mill to the woods and that's becoming more popular.  I myself know two crews doing that and oddly enough I've been talking with a local mill  owner about trying to take a mill in to a few larger pieces and see how it goes.   Its just talk now but when this was brought up several years ago we all dismissed it without a whole lot of thought or discussion.  Now with trucking being so expensive and log and lumber prices low it seems like it makes a lot of sense.    If we do try it Ill certainly post about it.

No way it could work on some tracks and some landowners would object but for the right pieces and the right equipment it has merit.   

The first guy I ever logged with had a family owned mill that went to the woods. He did it all his life.  That crew could break down a Frick circle mill and move it and set it back up faster than you would believe.

[DanielW]

+1 to what others have said. Plus (as also mentioned), you wouldn't exactly find room on a mountain top for a production-sized mill. And then if you did, it would only take a few weeks/months to clear out all the trees in the nearby area, then you're trucking everything else uphill to the mill or breaking down all the equipment to move again. And the lumber and all other byproducts still have to be trucked away, so all the material is being trucked down anyway. Full-scale mills don't have any waste - they don't just leave the dust, bark, and slabs in the bush like we do - it all has value and all goes somewhere. And these large production mills are a far cry from portable. Apart from the primary log breakdown, you need room for grading, trim, stacking, gangs, sorters (very large), optimizers, and a stupidly large electrical service to supply all the equipment.

Though I own, use, and love all my mills (two of which are portable), I also work for a company that makes large production-scale equipment, and thus I have no illusions about how small of a drop-in-the-bucket any portable equipment could be. The mill at a job I was recently at covers an area just under 130 acres. That's just the area for all their equipment, kilns, and log storage. They knock out about 900,000 bd feet a day on their green line, about 600,000 bd. feet a day on their dry structural grading line, and they're by no means the largest operation of their kind (not even close). You're not going to compete with those kind of numbers with anything even remotely-portable.

Years ago we built a semi-portable headrig, carriage, end-trimmer, and edger unit. It was for overseas (Japan sounds familiar, but I could be wrong), and to be broken down and mounted on 3 or 4 transports and moved to different sites. That's about as large as you're going to get with any portable setup. It was lucky to pass 25,000 bd. ft a day, so it still couldn't come close to competing with a proper production mill, and that's with no provision for any of the post-breakdown equipment (which usually takes up even more area than the primary breakdown).

[nativewolf]

Yep, they would bring a trailer mounted circle saw right to the woods and setup and saw.  We will harvest on a site where they did this for 30 years.  I've seen sites where this was done as recently as 25 years ago. 

I think for pine it would be expensive to make the numbers work.  The lumber all has to get graded and kiln dried and that's going to usually take some footprint.

[DanielW]

Scroll through this for an interesting description of how it was done back in the day, breaking down a circular rig and taking it to the site:

A mobile circular sawmill for farm woodlots in West Virginia : Byers, Jack B. : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive

[Don P]

All the mills we run are made for this. The Belsaw was considered , and is, portable. I could probably have it up and running on day 3. The Lucas and Alaskan can go to the fallen log and be running within an hour. I've worked them both on mountainsides. Production is laughable but my plate is small, it is low overhead. There's several ways of looking at how we do things.

[sawguy21]

The profitable high production mills are huge and not portable. Too it all depends on what is available for harvest, markets change so the timber licenses issued by our provincial government are constantly shifting to new locations. An acquaintance was hauling one load a day 200 miles, I have no idea how that was profitable for the truck owner or his customer.

[Joe Hillmann]

In addition to all the other reasons posted:

Most mills get logs coming to them from every direction.  If you move closer to one source of logs you are moving farther from another.

I would imagine many large mills sites have a life span close to a century.  So a spot that made sense 80 years ago may now be in the center of a city.

Mills need employees.  It is easier to get employees to the site where population density is higher.  It would be much harder to get and keep a few dozen employees if the population is extremely scarce and requires a long commute on very bad roads.

[rusticretreater]

Big trucks and heavy loads need good roads.  Not only to bring them in, but also to send them to market.  So location and available property drives placement too.  Sometimes it might be the land that daddy left to you.

But yeah, they cut all the trees close to the mill when they started.  Kinda like an old iron furnace.  Cleared the land for miles around them.

[Magicman]

Our Brick Plant used up all of the available clay dirt around it and ultimately had to close.

In the National Forest here, you can still find sawdust piles where the "ground hog" sawmills operated and some of the "dummy rail line" ROWs can still be seen.

[DanielW]

I forgot about these guys: They make (made?) a twin cut circular mill that gets hauled to site on a couple of large transports for the kind of work you're talking about.

I don't know if they exist anymore - can't find any info on them newer than a few years old. My guess is they didn't sell many (any?) units: Too large for a small-scale operation, too small to vie with the big boys.

Davco Twin Cut Mill: YouTube

[B.C.C. Lapp]

I've seen sites where this was done as recently as 25 years ago. 

Nativewolf I can show you a site where this was done last month and another where its happening right now.    :D

Really the only thing I have heard negative from the guys that do this is that to make whole packs of lumber to go out you have to have enough of a certain species to cut a whole trailer load.   So you kind of have to cherry pick the woods which as any logger knows is problematic at best.    Its also interesting that most of the crews milling in the woods are using draft power to skid the logs.     

[stavebuyer]

This was my Meadows #2 set up in the woods sawing ERC circa 1997. I have seen and done a lot since then, but the satisfaction of buying a long abandoned farm and sawing out the lumber was without equal.



 

Sorry for the scan of a polaroid. The Motorola bag phone didn't come equipped with a camera.

[Magicman]

I know where a portable sawmill will be set up on some Cypress logs tomorrow morning.   ;D

[dogone]

   In northern Saskatchewan the mills were built near the timber and a labor source. The few large remaining ones are near a major centre. Logs for sawing and pulp come from a radius of over 100 miles.
    Moving a mill closer to the source would bring a huge labor problem. No one wants to live in the bush anymore. Fellerbuncher operators will drive 100 miles for their shift. Then go home.

[Southside]

There were a lot of mills set up like that in Maine when the Spruce Bud Worm came through in the '70s and '80s.  You could find the sawdust piles along a stream for decades after, but that was salvage sawing everything possible as fast as possible, and the economics were different back then. It would not work today.

[Kodiakmac]

In this part of Ontario, the ever-increasing distance to remaining mills is to a great extent attributable to the provincial Ministry of the Environment's assault on small mills in the late '90s and early 2000s.  The closest bricks-and-mortar type mill is an hour and a half away, and with the insane federal taxes on fuel, most of us have given up shipping to these locations because of the prohibitive trucking costs. 

The flip side is that there has been a proliferation in backyard, portable mill operations.  But their appetite is almost exclusively white cedar, so we have a very limited market for hardwoods.

[barbender]

It is similar here- we keep losing mills (paper and osb) to markets, litigation, etc. It's not uncommon for our wood to move 120 miles one way. Most of the gate price for the wood goes to trucking on those long hauls.