I can't eat sawdust...

[JustinW_NZ]

Interesting post.
Im not sure of the sawmill landscape over there, where I live in NZ is the second biggest area for forestry.
(95% pine)

Pretty much all of the circ mills are gone, the last two closed this year, one was picked up by a timber merchant and there having troubles making it pay I suspect (very outdated and inefficient) the other they just shifted the production to another mill that was newer and cheaper to run.

the other mills are all multihead bandsaw type setups controlled by computers and produce 100+cube an hour of sawn pine.
then there's a handful of us smaller guys, who try and avoid most pine wood as its easy to loose money in pine with this big mills just cranking it out.

We target Eucs for flooring and better grade stuff, and also mill for some others, so yesterday I cut Ash, Elm, Oak and yew!
but its all things the big mills cant touch or would want to.

Haven't seen a stenner band around for a while (I tried to buy one as a break down saw - glad I didn't), its only the big mills running the large bands now, everyone else is pretty much gone thin kerf.
It sounds you might be sitting in the middle there somewhere needing a fair amount of production and cant easily afford the down time changing over.

All I can say 'there's never a right time bar yesterday' ...

Cheers
Justin

[longtime lurker]

Things are a little different here but...

I get what you mean about the pine guys. I can land sawn radiata here ex New Zealand onto the wharf Brisbane for about $450 a cube. I can't put enough hardwood sawlogs into the yard to cut a cube for that, much less saw it and present it to market.

Pine is a different game and the rule there is simple - the guy with the most volume wins... or wins until a resource with a lower cost base comes on line somewhere else in the world.

Hardwood is a bit different. But thats changing too. Australia is now the worlds fifth or sixth largest eucalypt processor, and a lot of those places cutting more (plantation stuff obviously) have a far lower cost structure. Give it 20 years and I'll be able to put cheap, fingerjointed, flooded gum boards ex China or Argentina onto the wharf Brisbane cheaper then I can turn my own sawmill on for.

As an aside - cause its sorta relevant - when the rainforest mills here all started shutting down there was one guy I knew had a truss plant so he just shut down the mill and kept on banging trusses together. Anyway every so often there'd be a load of logs, the high value cabinet timber stuff, hit the yard and they'd lay there a while then disappear, so I said to him one day "where are those logs going?". And he told me they were exporting the logs to Vanuatu and running them through a mill he had an interest in there, then shipping it back to Melbourne to his agent. I of course told him he was mad... he's shipping logs away from the sawmill yard when hes got a whole bloody mill that can throughput 8,000 cube a year sitting there idle, and a town full of guys that would be happy to come drive a bench for a few days just for old times sake. He told me it was 50% cheaper to truck those logs 2 hours to Cairns, ship then to Santos, then ship sawn KD to Melbourne... then it was to cut them in the Australian mill he had sitting idle. That was in 1994, and this country is even less competitive now.

I'm hearing ya on the bands. I think that - well them big eucalypt plantation operators in Spain, Portugal, France, Argentina, Brazil and China... don't run circle saws in euc either. They tend to favour quad canters with chipper reducers and I'm sure they didn't spend that kind of money on that kind of gear with that kind of production without crunching the numbers and making some dollars first. They ain't showed up with linebar carriages and grey saws thats for sure!!!

Here be a little different... we cut mature forest timber.... and the industry is all about smaller mills rather then the "one big facility" plantation processors. We'll have to compete with those plantation guys one day - but not just yet. But even here theres a lot of difference between guys like me and guys that run several mills. When you got several mills you have large stocks on hand to cover every common size/width/length combo - and the ability to make more in a hurry to fill an order. Little guys like me can't respond fast enough and very much the days when builders thought 3 months in advance about what they were going to need for a job seem over. Now they want to ring up Monday for a Friday delivery, and for us little guys that means we either can't cut it in time or we need a hell of a lot of sawn on hand at all times. I don't want to play that game.

Another issue here is freight, and distance. I mean heres me, and here's Sigidi, and we're in the same state, in the same country... and if I leave now at 7 am I can be there to have breakfast with him tomorrow. It's 18 hours of serious driving to Brisbane from here. My logs can come in from as much as 600km to the north or west of me at times, and freighting logs that cut 35% recovery is a nightmare. Shift the mill? Sure, but you can't get into or out of those places for 6 months of the year due to wet season road conditions... the analogy I use is that rain up here is like snow in Alaska... when it happens the whole place shuts down for 6 months.

I think for the small guy here the secret is in accuracy and straightness. Circle racks like a Kara are very poular here with the smaller mills for a reason - if you got a guy who knows how to drive one they are the most accurate piece of equipment out there today. You need to face saw a bit for straightness but - thats eucalypt and its just how it is regardless of what you use. But even then its about kerf... I've never seen one but I am aware that there are band racks out there and its the sliding rack/hob/ sizing roller combo that makes them cut consistant sizes - not the circle blade. My old Grey saw or any other linebar bench can't match them for that. But even if I shifted from where I am to say a Kara I'm still going to have that kerf inefficiency issue.

I dont see how a horizontal band resaw can do what I want it to do. Maybe you can help me there... bang a week of flitches into that 40 of yours and cut them up from the bottom without ever seeing your face board. and with guesstimate face cuts? I think i need verticle band... and besides... if I can't put my hand on the flitch as its feeding I might get bored with sawmilling. :D Theres a whole heap of reasons why I want verticle - knowing when to face cut, size changes due to grade variation being the main two. You gotta see it to know that this board is better being a 6 x 2 then a 6" floorboard, and you can't just weld it back together!!!

You can feed it to big bands harder then you can at small ones. That physics and metallurgy. I think that the thin band stuff has its place and indeed i think that the thin bands are driving the new technology forward. But I think that they are too thin and not stiff enough for what I do, and the speed at which I do it, at least if you dont want them wandering all over the place. But those 3 inch rigs... yah that I see as having potential. I don't know the nu,bers though... how much stiffer is a three inch band over a two inch band over an inch and a half band? You can sharpen them all at home so... how much performance do you guys loose by having 1 1/4"?

And performance is about two things... how fast it cuts and how accurate it cuts. Ain't no money in inaccurate sawmills. But there aint no money in slow ones either.