Planer tells the tale

[SawyerTed]

One of my best customers uses small drying sheds similar to the drying rack Bill built. His tin is on posts and is essentially a hinged roof he can lay back out of the way for loading.  

Then he wraps his loaded drying shed in landscape fabric.  It breathes but tends to shed water and snow. The landscape fabric also shades the lumber from any sun that may filter through his shaded locations.  

He's got five or six that are 4'x8', 4x10 and 4x12.  IIRC, he uses ratchet straps instead of weight.  

[Wlmedley]

Ted,I like the hinged roof idea . I'll have to think on that for a little bit. The design committee has already overwhelmed me with ideas and I'm kind of a slow thinker. I could possibly hinge a roof off the side of the shed. At this point I'm not really interested in sawing large quantity's of lumber but what I do saw I would like to be the highest quality I can produce. With my mill I'll never be able to cut a large amount of lumber but I can cut good lumber. Figuring out how to dry it without ruining it is my next challenge. Here's what I have so far although I did add a couple ratchet straps. If I had a FIL it would be alot easier but if a frog had wings he wouldn't constantly bump his butt.

[Old Greenhorn]

Thanks fellas . A lot of good ideas here. I'll probably use a combination of all of them.

You know this one might have boomeranged a bit. I was teaching my SIL entry level milling on my manual mill yesterday and he was asking what I was doing with the stuff I have milled and the logs I have on hand. As I was running through my thoughts I glanced at my drying rack pictured earlier and realized I never sheathed the roof as I planned. It was this thread that planted that thought in my head. Since I just took that pine off my front lawn last week and have another junky pine log to dice up I thought I wouldn't get much more than 1x6's or 8's out of it. That will work out just fine for sheathing.
 But the weather has to cool down first.

[GAB]

The early part of this thread was very interesting.  I never thought of using a planer to check for sawing quality, that was a real eye opener for me.
Someone wrote about sawing 1-1/4" and cleaning up at 1/2" - now to me that is very poor sawing and ending with birdhouse material.  I keep hearing about a lack of housing in this area, however I never heard it was a lack of bird housing.
Now if it cleans up at 3/8" that is jewelery box material.  The jewlers are going to like you as the owner will want to fill it.
Looking at Howard's bird houses he uses 1" material if my eyeballs are reading his pictures accurately.  If he sawed 1/2" he could almost double his production quantity for roughly the same wood material cost.  Since bird houses are used in the spring when the weather is warmer there is no need for the additional insulation.  Just sawing.  Oh HI Howard!
GAB

[Magicman]

Much bird house building material was not sawed for bird houses but is leftovers from previous projects.  Kind of a cleanup & salvage venture.

[GAB]

Much bird house building material was not sawed for bird houses but is leftovers from previous projects.  Kind of a cleanup & salvage venture.

MM:
I know I was just ribbing Mr. Green.
GAB

[SwampDonkey]

A lot of white cedar ain't good for much else unless you're making raised beds or fence boards and they be knot holey boards for sure. 

[YellowHammer]

I always used to end the sawing week by finishing a pack and toting it off to the air drying area, but now, I will leave a starter pack by the mill just so people can see and inspect the green wood off the mill, for our walk in retail sales days. 

It's "bait" for customers and to show off our quality control, as a business.  Customers will see it and and start making comments about how the wood already looks planed, no thick and thin, how flat it is, no cup or twist, just "glowing wood" and then they invariably start comparing it to my competitors wood.  I don't even go over there, they can draw their own conclusions.  Then they come over and start asking questions and here are my canned answers:

"Yes, I only sell kiln dried, hit or miss planed, and that is fresh sawn wood, I did it yesterday afternoon.  Nothing special, it's what I do.  You've not seen that quality come off other mills?  Huh, well maybe they had a bad day."

Yes, I sawed that 4/4 to 1-1/8", and will kiln dry it to 1- 1/16" and then hit or miss plane it to 15/16" only having to take 1/16" off each side to get a nearly fully planed, flat board.  That's all the stuff in this building.  It looks good, doesn't it, most are fully planed both sides, aren't they?  Yes, they have to be flat as a pancake for that, but ain't no big deal."

"No, I don't know what such and such's sawmill wood looks like, but if it doesn't look like this, why are you buying it?"

All that means little unless to can point to a pack of planned lumber, or better yet, a building and prove it to them.