Live edge slab organization

[Larry]

I live edge saw lots of walnut slabs.  Most are 16" to 22" wide which means too wide for shelves and too narrow for tables.  Normal use is a table or maybe a bar top which means gluing two to three slabs together.  For highest quality book matches are nice and certainly color/grain matches.  I need a method to keep track of the slabs to get those book matches, color/grain matches.  I've been using paint pens but the ink fades or gets scuffed off.  To process the slabs I saw, stack for air drying, put in kiln, and finally stack again when I pull the sticks.  Lots of places for the slabs to get jumbled.  How do you keep track of them?

I'm making a coffee table and found the perfect slab in about 2 minutes.  To find its mate for a book match took half a day and I moved at least 10 tons of slabs by hand!

[WV Sawmiller]

  I'll be following this thread closely for improvements in my system too. I do good to keep the same species together let alone keeping up with sibling slabs. :

[Old Greenhorn]

Larry, try some of these. They are aluminum and you can write on the with a dull nail or rounded off scribe. They are used by mushroom growers to label species, date and other inoculation data. They work well, will hold up in a kiln, and obviously are not subject to fading or weather.
The next specialty lumber I mill will be getting these.
EDIT: DUH! forgot the link: https://www.fieldforest.net/product/Aluminum-Tags/aluminum-tags

[Stephen1]

I like those Tom, I am going to order 50.
The next problem I am working on now is organizing my shop to show case them.

[caveman]

I'm certain that there are better methods, but we use a variety of sidewalk chalk colors and mark carpenter's triangles on the ends of the logs prior to sawing.  We'll generally saw three or four slabs and then flip 180 degrees.  Then we spray with borate and put them on a pallet.  They stay on the pallet until we load them up to take them to a retail store or stack them on racks in my shop.  The marks of one slab will hit the marks on the ones that came from above and below it and be the same color. 

[YellowHammer]

When I see nice bookmatched sisters when I'm sawing, I will take a white lumber crayon (or sharpie, whatever is handy) and put a big number on the end of the boards, both sisters getting the same number.  We go to a lot of non effort to keep all the slabs from each batch of logs in the same pallet group, which naturally keeps not only the sisters together, but all the slabs form the same logs together.  Then I will go through the drying process, keeping everything palletized, and then while planing a year later, I will pull the marked sisters out and put them on our A frame rack, side by side, price them and pretty much that's it.  The rest stay on the pallet and go on the showroom floor, in the same batch as the sisters, and some people will find matches to them in the pallet.  We only put out one pallet of slabs of each species to keep all the slabs consistent from the same logs generally, if too many are put out, it gives customers too many choices and also they make a huge mess mixing things up, pawing through stacks and stacks of wood.     

[chickenchaser]

... if too many are put out, it gives customers too many choices and also they make a huge mess mixing things up, pawing through stacks and stacks of wood.     

Like bolts...pvc fittings...NAILS!!!

30+ years ago I worked in a local building supply (non chain) and every so often restocking and especially inventory, more time was spent sorting than was appreciated.

Today if you follow me through one of the big box stores and my search lands me in a bolt bin or fastener drawer-  arg-smiley

The bad part is I can't leave without giving it some attention!

CC

[47sawdust]

A few years ago a customer walked into the local lumberyard.Nails were sold by the pound or in bulk.
"I'd like 2# of 4d finish nails and 2# of 6d finish nails."
Sales guy comes back with his 2 bags of nails and the customer dumps them all in one bag,pays and walks out.
Sales guy does a large eye roll ,"Where does he come from?''

Don't worry Yellowhammer he won't be coming your way.

[chickenchaser]

Makes you wonder if he had to come back and buy one of those thingys......
Uhhh....you know.
HAMMER! Yeah. That's what they call them!

[Stephen1]

I have seen the A Frame racks on different posts. Are they metal or can you build with wood? Do you put wheels on the frames?
All my wood is in the same area as I do not have other storage yet. I am looking at storing wood across the street in a storage unit.

[WV Sawmiller]

https://forestryforum.com/board/index.php?topic=121129.20

    Look at reply #22 in the link above. I believe this is the A-Frame racks Robert is talking about. They appear to be made of wood.

[Don P]

We use those fancy aluminum write on tags when moving log cabins and such to keep things straight. Mine say Coke on the back  ;)

[customsawyer]

DonP I would give you a smiley face beside your name if I knew how. That made me laugh.

[DON FRANK]

I have pieces of tyvek house wrap cut about 1 1/2"x 4". I write any info needed on the tyvek with a permanent marker and staple it to the end of the board or slab.They stay on pretty well and help me keep track of stuff.
   On special pieces I write an id # or info on the face with a lumber crayon then wet the slab and take a pick with a dedicated inexpensive digital camera. When the slab is dried and ready to sell it helps to have  a pic of what the fresh cut wood looks like instead of a dried up gray slab. Gives someone an idea of what they are buying.

Obviously this would quickly get out of hand in yellowhammers operation but mine is small spuds.

[longtime lurker]

It took me a long time to come up with an effective stock management system for slabs. I figured out eventually that for me to make any $ out of the things I had to be able to manage a couple of things namely
1. Be able to find what I had
2. Be able to show the customer what I had
3 Do both the above with minimal effort so I didn't have to handle tons of wood to make a sale.

I have never done a lot of slabs, and towards the finish i was really only slabbing out anything too ugly to make boards. Ugly and highly figured of course go hand in hand. And I've never liked slabs so there wasn't that many of them.

Every log got a number
Every slab got a number in the order they came off the log. If the log got turned during sawing the number sequence changed to reflect that so that a "reconstructed" log would have the slabs sequential from top to bottom.
Every slab had those details written both ends, top and bottom,and dimensions were on the faces.
Lots of pictures got taken: top and bottom from both sides. Ain't hard to take decent pictures anymore
The pictures were uploaded to a drive folder.

This way I could email any customer a link to my full slab inventory... generate a link, email and they had the full run of what was in stock to browse through and they could then email me back saying they wanted to look at slab number 255(log number) /01,/02, /03 and slab 189/04 and 189/05 which could be pulled from stock at my convenience before the customer was in my yard.
Once something was sold it was marked sold in the computer system so I knew what I had.

So here's a link to a log set, dunno if it will work here but let's see:

Log set 300 SOLD - Google Drive


Don't play around with crayon or paint pens, get proper ballmarker inks because the stuff stays visible for years.

And in generating that link I realised I haven't slabbed out a log in 6 years. Lucky me ;D
But it was a pretty effective (though not yet perfect) stock management and sales system for stuff that's otherwise time consuming and it saved a lot of effort handling big heavy bits of wood for people to get a look at them.

[Brad_bb]

Maybe I missed it, but did you say if you're storing your slabs horizontally in stacks or vertically in racks?  There's a good thread on here about storing slabs vertically so you can show them to customers and get easier access to them.  You may not be able to store all your slabs like this, but quite a few in a building.
Check out page 17-22 in this thread, you can just scroll through to look at the pics to see the type of vertical storage I'm talking about.
https://forestryforum.com/board/index.php?topic=109514.320

I was inspired by that thread to build a rack on an 8ft long pallet for my barn wood, so I can store and easily go through to find the pieces I need for a project.
https://forestryforum.com/board/index.php?topic=123559.msg2010720#msg2010720

[WV Sawmiller]

https://forestryforum.com/board/index.php?topic=121129.20

   Here is a sister thread to the one Brad posted above. Look at reply 30 to see some of my storage.


 



 

    The above pictures are some later views of my storage. I am still working on it and need to move some slabs around and sort them by species and size. I also need to throw out or trim some waste off some of the slabs. I only saw rough slabs and air dry them. I do not do any finish work on them or try to keep siblings stored together but when I store/sort them by size and species the siblings will generally end up together or real close. Storing them vertically is working much better than when I had them stored horizontally as I can pull and inspect or sell an individual slab without having to move a ton of wood.

   I question the process to mark the slabs as they are sawed. The only way I can see that is effective would be if I had made up a bunch of tags before sawing then just attached a tag to each as I cut it.

   I like and understand the locator system and will consider it when I get further along in my clean up and organization. I have been a warehouse manager and have set up storage and distribution systems from start to finish so I can easily do that when the time comes. When I used to run warehouses I always said the two things you needed in a warehouse was 1) Know what you have and 2) Know where it is. It sounds like Lurker has that system well in hand. When I grow up I hope to have one just like his. :D

[longtime lurker]

I wouldn't have 20 slabs in stock today and that's about 13 too many.... the other 7 are for various one day projects of my own.

I stripped mine out horizontally as a sawn log and left them that way to air dry. Ran out of shed space and built big cantilever racks to fit more in. Ran out of racks and built more racks. Which is why I got away from slabs... I was only slabbing logs that were either ugly or big and often both and the things aren't easy to stack either wet, dry, or get in a kiln. It was tieing up a lot of floor space and a lot of cash in inventory.... It was a profitable niche market but the turnover sucked and ultimately I found something that worked for me better.



 

But what I can tell you is those slabs have been there 6 years and a blind man on a galloping horse could read the inventory number in ballmarker ink still. And I got a heap of racking space everywhere for pack storage so it's not like that got wasted. That picture is two rack units side by side to carry 20' of whatever.... I got about a dozen of the things sometimes singly for short stuff, sometimes doubled or tripled up for multi pack storage. It works.

[WV Sawmiller]

https://forestryforum.com/board/index.php?topic=121129.0

LL,

   I feel your pain! On reply #12 in the above link you can see several locations where I had slabs stored. I had built add-ons and shelves and had them stacked outside on pallets and just ran out of space. That is why I went to the vertical bins and I love them.