8/2/2023 0 Comments Sawmill plans![]() So we just rolled up our sleeves and went to work. And our trusty two ton truck with its 14-foot-long bed was all we needed to haul the logs home. And we already had a good chain saw with which to trim and section the trees we selected. The strong, young men in our group were willing to spend long and hard days in the woods in order to save several thousand dollars in lumber costs. Getting those culls out of the forest was easier for us than you might think. Twenty thousand feet! Needless to say, we paid the $15.00 and made the promises. They were as cooperative as could be and told us that, for the trifling sum of $15.00 and the promise that we’d observe simple fire precautions and leave the roads and woods as we found them, we could have a permit to haul out 20,000 feet of cull logs. The trees were within physical reach but what about legal access? Would the National Forest Service let us have a few of the logs that were going to waste? “Well,” we told ourselves, “it won’t hurt to ask.”īuoyed by such homespun wisdom, we made our way down to the local office of the NFS and explained to the rangers on duty what we had in mind. The smaller trees, called “cull” in the trade, were too little for commercial use but they were certainly big enough for us! And there was so much cull scattered within easy reach of the timbering roads that we knew we’d easily be able to reach all we wanted with our two-ton truck (we wouldn’t need a tractor, winch, or any other heavy equipment to drag the trees from the forest). And we quickly noticed that the loggers had felled many fine smaller trees to make the clearings and roads they needed to haul out the really big logs they were actually after. So we just took a little drive into the areas of forest that the commercial logging outfits were licensed to cut. (After all, it did seem pointless to spend a lot of time and energy designing a mill if we couldn’t get logs to cut with it.) Here’s how we did it: Legal Access to Cull Logsīefore we did anything else, we checked out the availability of all those national forest trees that surrounded our property. “What we need,” we told ourselves, “are two things: legal access to those trees and our own sawmill.”Īnd, surprisingly enough - after we’d analyzed the problem - it only took a little applied imagination, a few inquiries, the passing of several weeks, and the expenditure of approximately $600 to put both the legal access and the sawmill neatly in our hip pocket. And we had such a great location too: high on a bluff overlooking a quiet river valley. ![]() How we envied that mill! Because, with all those millions of fine trees in the mountains around us, the high retail cost of lumber was keeping us from constructing a house right there on our very own homestead. There we were, right next door to a national forest, and every day we could see huge flatbed trucks chug into the woods and cart hundreds of giant logs out to a commercial lumber mill a few miles away. Homemade Cheese Recipes: Cheese Making Articles.Sustainable Farming & Agriculture Articles.Power Equipment Articles - Lawn and Garden Equipment.Raising Ducks and Geese: Articles & Ideas.Homesteading Poultry - Chicken, Turkey, Ducks Archives. ![]()
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