continued from index

Sometimes it's just a sentimental thing.

Beyond sentiment and romantic notions, there also are compelling financial reasons for hiring a portable mill. Lumber, as every cottager is reminded on a regular basis, is expensive, and when you buy a plank at a building supply centre, part of the price goes to pay for the tree. That means that if you already own the wood, the value you liberate from your own logs will quickly overtake the cost of milling.

Each sawyer has his own rates, but the arrangement Philip and I had with Nesbitt was not unusual; he bills $50 per hour for his time, plus $50 to cover his travel and setup. He asks that people arrange a minimum of four hours of cutting and notes that sometimes two or more customers will pool their timber for one cutting session, as Philip and I did.

Some tough back-of-the-napkin calculations give a sense of the savings to be had. Circumstances vary with the species and dryness and condition of the wood, but if, for example, a cottager has a clean white pine log about 24" in diameter, 10' long, and recently cut, then the economics work out something like this: In less than 30 minutes, Nesbitt's mill can transform that log into 2" x 4"s, 2" x 6"s, and 1" material totaling approximately 270 board feet. (A board foot is any equivalent of 1 " x 12" x 12".) The cost of similar material (dried and planed) at the lumberyard would be about $1.50 per board foot, or a total of $405. The cost to you for the sawyer's time will be just over $25, meaning that a good-sized pine log has a value to you of over $300 before drying.

If that log happened to be oak or maple, it would have a lumberyard price of $8 or more per board foot. In the unlikely event that you got all select-grade material from your log, the value of your little stack of lumber would jump to more than $2,100. You would be more likely to get 50-75 per cent select material from a log, though even with some knots and imperfections, the value would still be significant. A portable mill can easily handle I0 to 12 such logs in a good day of cutting.

The saws that make all this possible are themselves a marvel. They tow easily behind a pickup truck, yet perform prodigiously. The mill on which Art Nesbitt cut my pine and Philip's oak is an Enercraft/Baker 30HTL. With just a 24-hp engine, it is able to handle logs up to 20'6" in length and 30 inches in diameter.

For the customer hiring the mill, knowing capacity is important because it determines the length of the lumber that can be produced, and also because a smaller mill may necessitate pre-splitting logs with a chainsaw in order to fit the rig. It is also worth knowing that fully hydraulic mills such as this also allow the sawyer to reposition the log this way and that between cuts, which makes it easier to get the best boards from the log.

A traditional sawmill relies on a huge power plant turning an immense circular blade that spins but remains stationary. The logs on a moving carriage pass by at astonishing speeds, and boards peel away like salami from the deli slicer. The portable mills, by contrast, use band saws. As the name suggests, the blade that does the Cutting is a flexible metal loop, or "band," that travels over large wheels. It has a sharpened edge not unlike a bread knife. The wood is clamped tightly onto the "bed," then the entire cutting mechanism - the blade, the wheels, the drive motor, and the fuel tank - moves sedately over the log, cutting as it goes.

With its first pass, the mill produces a flat surface, and with that as a starting point, the sawyer is able to turn the log exactly 90 degrees and to produce a squared-up "cant" of any desired dimension. He can then adjust the height of the blade by precise increments to slice off 1", 2", or 4" planks.

Yet despite the leisurely speed at which they cut, portable mills are cost effective. The " kerf " (the blade-width of material ground into sawdust by each cut) is as much as 3/16" narrower for band saws than for typical circular blades. On a log 20" in diameter - one that might require 25 minutes to cut - the narrow kerf delivers up to 30 per cent more material. If the original log is a 12-foot chunk of maple, then those bonus boards will be worth $450-$700 depending on its quality. Over the course of a day, the value of those extra planks alone will dwarf the cost of the rental.

Of course, for most cottagers, the comparison with traditional mills is moot; the portable mills are appealing exactly because they are portable. You don't need to have your own truck, and you don't need to worry about loading tree trunks and hauling them to the mill. All it takes is a reasonably accessible driveway, and a neat pile of logs set off to the side. "That's the important part," says Nesbitt. "If the logs are all stacked together, then I can usually get in beside them, and that saves a lot of work."

A top-end rig like Nesbitt's will be equipped with hydraulic lifts that hoist the logs and drop them straight onto the rig. During my two days as a sawyer's assistant, those lifts became my favourite part of the mill. Every time they flipped an entire tree trunk onto the saw, they not only saved my back, they also saved time and money. If you also have a nearby area where you can stack the finished lumber, then the entire process moves along with surprising speed, and in even a single day will net you a truly gratifying stack of boards.

And what do you do with all that wood? Under the Ontario Building Code, the lumber used for building residences Must be kiln-dried and graded by a government-sanctioned inspector. Virtually everything else, however, can be built from your own lumber, once it's dry, including outbuildings of all kinds, decks, docks, planting boxes, picnic tables and corner hutches."

From Cottage Life October 2003
by Kingston-based writer Tom Carpenter