I had an outfit call me today asking if I wanted to sell my slabwood in truck load quantitys. I said "sure!" They asked what I wanted for it but I could not think of a good answer.
Anyone have the average or normal price for slabwood in bulk?
The going price for firewood around here is $175/cord. If you are not going to buck the slabs up then you could sell it to them for half of that.
I would not let someone in my yard with their own loading equipment or use mine. I would charge an hourly rate for me to load them up, using local machine rates.
I would answer that question with a question.....how much do you have and how much valuable space is it taking up?
I sell my slabs in 16'/2cord bundles for $200 delivered. I had way to much taking up way to much space. I finally got it down to a reasonable amount and use it for heating the shop now. The way I figured it I was going to have to have a big bon fire or get what I could for them, people loved the slabs and loved the price.
Ask what you feel comfortable asking and get rid of them. Then you have room to put lots of finished product. Or you could use the money to build a new shop where they used to sit. ;D
A lot more questions. Are the slabs hardwood or softwood? Have the logs been de-barked before sawing or not?
Local mills around here can ship their de-barked hardwood slabs to a charcoal mill. We visit with a larger mill south of us that does just that. The owner said the return for the year was about enough to blow on a night out on the town. The major value to him is that he's getting rid of them.
I guess softwood slabs could be used in paper or bedding products. We would only have a few red cedar slabs so we don't even get into that.
We sale our barky slabs for $10/PU load – buyer loads by hand. We will dump slabs off our mill onto their trailer for $10 for a small trailer, $20 for like a large load on a 20' trailer. We won't load from what we have already dumped in the pile because they cross and tangle up too bad to fool with. We don't bundle.
WHen I was working at the mill, we only had slabs when the chipper broke down. WHen that happened we piled slabs in a rack 4' by 4' by however long the wood was. When the rack was full we double banded it and took them outside. We got $25 a bundle. Debarked mixed hardwoods. The aspen was $15 So, bundles were somewhere around a cord. THat was 3 or 4 years ago. I dont know what the market is now.
Not much better. The only guy in the area that I know that sells slabs is $20 a load, all you can load.
sell them? i can hardly give em away. but i did install a wood stove in my open front sharpening shed. and you would be surprised at how warm it gets in there. i am surprised at how clean it is getting around the mill. you would understand if you could see all the stuff i run through the wood stove. i have no scraps around at allnow. we did have have to put steel in place of where the glass was in the doors of the stove.......... ::) after dads little inner tube incident the other day.
Quote from: ely on January 09, 2009, 09:16:26 AM
after dads little inner tube incident the other day.
You know you have to explain that one now?
well it all started the other day when we installed the stove , it had one glass broke out of the front, so dad says i bet i have some tempered glass down in the junkyard. i say well bring it on up and we will see. :D
he leans it up in front of a roaring fire, and i yell from over at the sharpener for him to come over here quick, because he proceeded to stand there to observe the science project. he no more than turned around when the piece of glass desinegrated.
i then say i believe that was just 1/4 plate that we were saving for a coffee table, he grunted and said something about another bigger piece down there. and left. he returned after a few minutes and has a yet bigger piece of glass. about 2 ft x 5ft. he leans it up and runs. after 20 minutes or so i say i think that is the real deal for the stove glass. so i walk over and pick it up with gloves on and take it outside to cool down. it was very hot by the way.
fast forward a couple days, we have had a few discussions about how to cut the glass. he says my fancy glass cutter won't do it cause he had tried it on a smaller piece last year. dad swears he can cut it on his wet tile saw, i say OK. what do we really have to lose.
well the next day he tried it, he tells me i was cutting right along and had about 4 inches done and all of a sudden there was no more glass. just gone, sort of like the back window in his new truck back in 1976...thats a different story.
we are now back to square one, one broke glass and one opening. in the mean time we have recieved enough rain to wet all the kindling and stuff to make the fire with. so get some paper and cedar bark and get it to smoldering, then i cut me a piece of inner tube that we took out of the crazy wheel on my plow. dad was not around, i used a piece of rubber that was aproxamately the size of a playing card. it worked great and in minutes i had a nice fire going.
dad shows up and asks how i got the fire started with wet wood, i just said i used some of the inner tube.
next day i come home from work and see we now have a severley modified wood stove, ie.. no doors at all with lots of glass laying around.
eveidently rubber burns at a very high BTU when compared to wood, and dad used half of the inner tube that morning to get the fire going. i had to laugh... i do that when working with dad alot... it keeps me from crying.
he proceeded to cut some metal to replace the the glass in the doors, and now after a little mig welding the stove works very nice again according to dads words. he says ::) when ask him about all the ambiance we have lost with the glass being gone. he even laughs out loud when i tell him he makes it tougher all the time for me to attract the chicks.
oakiemac, don't you have a wood boiler heating your house and shops and kilns? Seems like you could use up most of that slab wood.
I have about 2 PU truck loads of w/pine & Cherry slabs at the edge of my yard.
Lots of neighbors know it's up for grabs, but no one seems to really want it.
It's easy access even now with the snow on the ground, but still, no takers.
Most of my customers end up with the slab piles just rotting. Some of them use it at their camps & backyard fire pits.
Some of the Amish mills around here get $5.00 - $10.00 for "all you can load"!
ely, if you want to get rid of your slab wood put a price on it ;) I was in the same boat years ago, and I couldn't give the stuff away, even the hardwood (didn't have a woodstove at the time). Put a price on it and ran an ad, and I could've sold ten times what I had. I haven't been sawing much lately, so all of mine goes in the woodstove :)
I have an outside wood stove that will gobble up all I produce when I finaly get the mill going.. 8), then I won't be one of those buying from amish mills for 8 a load... ;D.
ely
Having your dad around is priceless...you will have lots of fond memories later in life :).
We call them Senior moments .When dad pulls a stunt.that would have gotten me a reaming.I just shake my head and laugh .
Quote from: Foxtrapper on January 09, 2009, 08:48:01 PM
ely
Having your dad around is priceless...you will have lots of fond memories later in life :).
Amen to that.....My dad passed on 22 years ago and I still think about him often. He wouls have had a ball with my mill ;D
IMHO it would depend on your area market. I guess in some places it sells well so folks can charge quite a bit for it, other it dont sell at all. I have a friend who goes trail riding in midwestern Arkansas who took to driving down there in his ton dump truck and landscape trailer just to buy slabwood. Man charges him $5.00 a truck or trailer load for the wood and $10.00 to load each if he wants it loaded. Some people cant give it away. If your market is similar you can charge outrageous amounts for the waste and burn most of it in the spring or you can sell it cheap as this man does and get rid of a good bit of it. You can charge a modest fee to load it and make a little bit of money or you can outprice yourself for the labor and wind up using your FEL to pile it in burn piles anyway. Kind of gets on my nerves how some people charge an arm and a leg for something that was going to go totally to waste anyway, dont make any sense to me whatsoever.
Quote from: okie on January 10, 2009, 01:04:43 PM
........... Kind of gets on my nerves how some people charge an arm and a leg for something that was going to go totally to waste anyway, dont make any sense to me whatsoever.
Pricing something is interesting, as sometimes the buyer thinks because it is a low price, he won't buy.
Example. Friend of mine with a sporting goods store bought a shipment of around 1000 swiss army knives that customs confiscated. He bid and bought the shipment for $20 (If I remember right, but may have been $200). Anyway,
Put them in his store with a price tag of $.99 each. Figured to make good money for his effort and pass on the good deal to his customers. They didn't sell. People would barely even pick them up to look at them, and they were authentic.
He got rid of them only when he changed the price to $9.99....and they then sold like hotcakes. Go figure.. ::) ::)
More recently, he bid and rec'd many pounds of knives confiscated from people at airport security. He bought them by the pound from a guy who gets them from the airports through a bid process. I've seen the boxes of now sorted knives of every imaginable description, size, and value. He takes them to sports shows and sells them there for about 1/4th of their retail value.
Sometimes we make decisions on what we perceive the price to be for what we expect to be the value.
I sold eastern red cedar slabs for $45 PU load, level with the top of a standard sized pickup, when I was selling to the public. I started out selling them for $25 a load but found out real fast that was too low. Still couldn't keep them around at $45. People were using them for fence pickets and outbuilding siding. Projects too I think.
I don't know if you ever mill any erc, but if you do you can sell those higher. Least around here you can.
Tried to give away slabs for years. Couldn't do it, had to burn. Started selling them and can not keep them.
My first year sawing full time we piled them loose and tried giving them away. No luck.
The next year we started bundling them -- 8' long bundles, 1/2 cord each, slabs and edgings mixed, 2 straps per bundle. We'd roll them off the forklift into the back of a pickup, or the customer could pop the bundle open and load them by hand. Cost was $25 per bundle.
We only sold about half the year's production the first year we did it. After that we sold a year's production each year, so we always had at least half a year's supply of bundles on the ground. That was OK 'cause the customers were getting air-dried slabs instead of green wood.
Last year I sold everything we had. People were coming by and digging green bundles out of the snow.
Typical conversation:
Whiny Customer: How much for a bundle?
Me: $25.
WC: There's a heckofa lot of small stuff in those bundles.
Me: Yep.
WC: Awful lot of park in there, too.
Me: Yep.
WC: How much if I take 10 bundles off your hands.
Me: $250.
WC: No discount for volume?
Me: Nope, you already used up your discount trying to bargain with me (OK, I didn't really say that -- but I was thinking it ;D)
WC: Maybe I'll check out that firewood guy up the road. He seems to have bigger stuff.
Me: OK, see you tomorrow. (And I usually did.)
Basically, we tried to cover our handling costs, just so's we could move the stuff out of the yard.
When I had my mill out at the log yard I was happy to see trailers lined up to dump slab wood on. @ $50.00 a trailer load it was some extra chump change... I piled slabs up as high as I could get them on trailers for $50.00. No trailers meant I had to dump slabs on the log yard slab trailer, a huge old converted military looking thing on wheels that was hauled out with a big tractor to the boiler.
Odd but we worked the log yard slab trailer during the warm months and when it got cold customer trailers would start lining up. I always thought this was a little backwards... The boiler got the dry wood from the summer months and customers got the green wood in the winter months. I always though would burned better seasoned than green:D Guess not many people think about heating much in the summer hu?
I forgot I had posted this thread ::) Must be going through some senior moments.
Anyways, thanks for the responses. I think I'll try puttin an ad in the paper and sell them loose then next year try bundling them. I hadnt planned on selling slabwood because we added a woodstove to the house but it doesnt even begin to make a dent in the piles since I mostly burn KD cut offs and ripping waste. I didnt get an outdoor wood boiler because the initial investment is just too stiff. I'd rather spend my money on new planers and SLR saws. Plus the distance from my shop and kilns to the house would make it necessary to have one to heat the house and one for the shop.
N. Central Tn $21. ton. all weight wood.
It's up right now because mills are closed so the slab mkt. is dried up.
A charcoal mill is the only one buying.
Saw logs are being sold for $21. ton.
jim
With the price of fuel somewhat lower than it's been, cord wood should have come down a bit but I dont see that here (NH). Most of what I have milled lately has been soft wood (white pine) so its not saleable anyway but I dont see why hardwood shouldn't sell for the same price as cord wood, wich in these parts are around 200 a cord cut and split. 100 a cord in log form. In a fairly nice pile I just would run a chainsaw through the pile (carfully) at or about stove length and voalla, cut and split cord wood 200.$ thank you. I think many of you who stated marketing is the key, Sell too low and people wont buy, they think its worthless, charge more and you'll sell like hotcakes. :D
Quote from: oakiemac on January 12, 2009, 06:29:36 PM
I think I'll try puttin an ad in the paper and sell them loose then next year try bundling them.
The first year we started selling them, the marketing guy ran the ad for 3 weeks in the local weekly paper. I suggested that perhaps 2 months would be more appropriate. Folks notice the ad, but then forget to follow up. When they finally think about it, it's not running anymore.
Wasn't until this past year that they ran the ad for an appreciable length of time. What a difference that made -- cleaned us right out.