The Fool on the Hill: Final thoughts before committing to buy a sawmill

Contents

1. Why do I need milled timber?
2. Why can't I depend on friends' sawmills?
3. Why can't I depend on commercial sawmills?
4. What would a sawmill cost?
1. Options
5. Is the mill sufficient unto itself?
1. Tools
2. Installation
6. Running costs and long term use
1. Blades
2. Fuel
3. Other maintenance
7. Access to logs
8. Mobility

Having sold some of my cattle, I now have a small amount of capital I can use. It is a very small amount — £3,000 — and it would be very easy to fritter it away.

There are, essentially, four priority projects it could be used for.

1. An electric bicycle. My fitness has degraded substantially, either due to Covid or to age (or both), and cycling up the hill home on an unassisted bike is now such hard work that I am deterred from doing it. So, an electric bike of my own would make life easier. But I can hire one of the village fleet of electric bikes for £20/month, and while they're not what I'd personally choose, they're OK.
2. Guest accommodation. This is very much a one-person, and certainly a one bedroom, house. I have long wanted somewhere for guests to stay, and that essentially means a separate cabin. But to achieve a new cabin for £3,000 or anywhere near it, I'd need to build it myself. And most of that cost would be timber. If I had my own sawmill, new cabins would be inexpensive to build — all I'd need to buy would be fastenings, glazing and possibly roof cladding.
3. A tractor shed. My tractor doesn't benefit from being left out in the rain, especially in winter. My tractor is a really important asset, which makes so many jobs around the croft easier. I need it to last. But again, having my own sawmill would greatly reduce the cost of a tractor shed.
4. The sawmill, which is what this document is all about.

Why do I need milled timber?

1. I need to finally finish the cattle shed;
2. I need a tractor shed, and ideally, sheds to store my boat and all my machinery;
3. I want to be able to help Lucy build her cabin, and, probably, Rob to build his;
4. I want guest accommodation;
5. I will want milled timber for other projects in future, including fencing, furniture and other things.

Why can't I depend on friends' sawmills?

There are already two sawmills on this farm, and, off the farm, I have a number of friends who also have sawmills. However, people are — quite reasonably — very cautious about lending their sawmills. Although I can sometimes get timber sawn at 'mates rates', none of my friends are first and foremost sawmillers. They use their mills infrequently, typically when they have projects of their own they want to do, so in practice I can't get sawn timber when I need it from friends' sawmills. Also, the cost of moving logs from my wood to other peoples' mills and back again would be substantial.

Why can't I depend on commercial sawmills?

Frankly I can't afford it. Planking for the east wall of the cattle shed — thirty of four metre 200x25mm boards — would cost about £800, which is why it still isn't done. Commercial timber to build guest accommodation would certainly exceed the capital I have available.

What would a sawmill cost?

The timber I have in my wood is spruce poles about 15 metres tall and about 900mm girth at breast height. They're variable, some are bigger and some smaller, but that's about it. So I don't need a big sawmill; these are pretty small trees, and this is what I'm going to be able to cut because this is what I have. Of the inexpensive small sawmills that are available, Woodland Mills have a good reputation and we actually have one here on the farm and they're well reviewed, so that's the make I am (almost certainly) going to buy. Their smallest model will fit the timber I have.

Options

There are three options in making a decision about the exact model: engine, trailer, and length. The base sawmill costs £2,988 (all figures in this document include VAT at 20% and are valid as of 20th October 2022) is available

1. engine: with a 7 horsepower or 9.5 horsepower engine — a difference in cost of £120. It is also possible to get an electric powered version of this mill, but it required a three phase supply and there's no way I can afford that.
2. trailer: with an integral trailer or without. The integral trailer is not suitable for road use; if the sawmill were ever moved off-farm, it would need a separate road trailer anyway. If the integral trailer model is chosen, the sawmill bed cannot be extended, so you can't buy a short bed and later add to it. Given that I am of the opinion that I need to be able to cut five metre beams, that mean the longer integral trailer, which ends up as being almost £5,000, which I can't afford. In any case, the trailer adds over £1,500 to the cost of the mill, and, additionally, it raises the mill substantially off the ground, meaning heavy logs need to be lifted higher onto it.
3. bed extensions: if an integral trailer is not chosen, the sawmill bed can be extended in increments of 1.95 metres. Actually it can be extended indefinitely in such units, which would be a good thing if one was wanting to mill timber for yacht masts; but the basic sawmill can mill timber up to 3.1metres, so with one extension it can mill up to 5 metres, which is what I think I need. The extensions cost £288 each.

Additionally, a protective cover is available for the mill head is available for £106.80, and I think it would be very foolish not to get this.

So what I think I need is:

Which is, yes, more than the capital I have available, so it would have to be slightly deficit financed. If one wanted to scrimp, the 7.5 horsepower engine would save £120, which is less than 5%.

Is the mill sufficient unto itself?

Tools

Aye, there's the rub. No, it's not. Some additional tools would be needed to use it effectively.

The advice, to my surprise, is to mill logs very fresh. Fresh cut logs are heavy. Moving the logs to the mill, and loading them onto the mill, needs some tooling. I can pull logs with my tractor, but only in places where I can get my tractor in, and frankly there aren't (yet) routes into my wood my tractor can use. Or I can sit the tractor outside the wood and pull logs out with a tractor-mounted winch, but I don't have and probably won't be able to afford one. Or I can use a hand winch, which for the time being I can borrow, but if I wanted to buy one they come surprisingly expensive — for what I would need about £350. But, again, I would not need to buy this, at least not immediately.

Dragging logs through the wood is not ideal, since mud on the bark will accelerate the wear on saw blades, but any solution to lift the logs out of the wood is beyond what I can afford.

A tool to roll logs is fairly important to get them onto the mill safely. A cant hook will do this, but while good ones cost upwards of £100, a cheap Chinese one is £16, which will do.

Installation

The mill can be used just built on level ground, and, initially, it will have to be. But the quality of the timber it produces is affected by how stable and level the surface is on which it is installed, so the general advice seems to be to make a sturdy wooden trestle the full length of the mill. Obviously, the mill can cut the timber to make the trestle, so the trestle doesn't cost much money, but it does cost substantial labour. While the cover I plan to buy for the mill will provide basic weather protection, but I'd prefer to have a fairly sturdy shed over at least the head end of the mill to improve protection.

A lot of people who have sawmills like this have full length roofed shelters over the whole bed of the machine. I'm wary of this because, firstly, it's a lot of timber to cut which doesn't contribute to the projects I'm buying the mill for, but secondly we have extremely high windspeeds here, and that roof strikes me as a real risk in terms of aerodynamic lift. Nevertheless it would be nice to be able to mill on wet days, so the skeleton of a roof over which it was possible to throw a tarp would be a nice thing.

Finally you need somewhere to store fresh-milled timber to dry, and that 'somewhere' also needs to be flat and level and ideally roofed. Obviously, in summer, the hayloft provides a perfect place; but only in summer because in winter it's full of hay, and if at hay harvest it's full of drying timber that's going to be a real nuisance.

The longer timber has to dry after being milled and before being used, the less it will subsequently shrink and warp.

So in the medium term, a drying shed is going to be needed.

## Am I up to big, long term projects?

The mill isn't worth buying unless I do complete the cattle shed, the tractor shed, guest accommodation, and a cabin for Lucy. If it just sits around doing nothing it's a huge waste of money, and that I can ill afford.

However, I did build this house, and I did build the cattle shed. Both were (for me) very big commitments of time and of money, and while neither is perfect both have been carried though to very satisfactory state — with help from friends, which I'm grateful for, certainly; but I did them.

So I think I can use a sawmill, effectively, for benefit.

Running costs and long term use

Blades

The blades on the mill will wear out. A consignment of ten new blades from the manufacturer costs £288 inc VAT, and my calculations from watching other people's videos is that each blade cuts about 90-100 boards.

Most of the people who use this make of mill do not debark logs before milling them. Debarking logs is a lot of work. However, its undoubtedly the case that debarking would make the blade last longer, especially if we're dragging logs through the mud.

Compatible blades are available at lower price from other suppliers at slightly lower cost, and blades can typically be resharpened up to about 5 times; but allowing about 30 pence per board for blade costs is probably not far wrong.

Fuel

Neither the makers of the mill nor the makers of the engine quote figures for fuel consumption; but this advert suggests that the engine manufacturer expects 21 horsepower engines in the same family to burn about a gallon — about five litres — an hour, so let's take that as an upper bound. That means less than £10/hour for fuel, which, given about 20 boards per hour, means less than 50p per board for fuel (probably considerably less, but let's be cautious).

Other maintenance

Blades are essentially the main consumable of a sawmill, but there will be occasional other replacements needed such as filters, belts and possibly bearings. It's unlikely those are going to add up to more than 10 pence per board.

Access to logs

As long as I have fellable spruce in my wood, I have logs I can saw. I also have some degree of entitlement to extract timber from Commons Wood. At some stage — hopefully this winter — the main part of the mess in my wood will be taken out by contractors, and conceivably that might even yield a bit more capital. But frankly if contractors say to me they can only make a profit if they clear the whole wood, my answer is going to be "then don't". Yes, more than half of it's a mess, and the mess would be better gone, but it's unlikely that I will profit hugely from it.

So either

1. Contractors clear about two thirds of the wood (and maybe I make a little profit), and that leaves me a third to fell over time for my own use; or
2. I don't have contractors in which means that all the spruce is available for my own use.

In either case, there's more than enough timber for the projects I envisage.

Mobility

Without the integral trailer, moving the sawmill will be a significant project. The total weight is around 300Kg, of which 200Kg is in the mill head. However, the mill head will fit into the link box of the tractor, so can be transported in that; and the bed can be dismantled for movement. The trestle I build for the mill should also be designed to allow dismantling and re-erection.

I don't want to move timber too far to the mill, both because it's a lot of work and because dragging logs through the mud will lead to faster blade wear. So the idea is, I think, first to erect the sawmill on the edge of the wood to get started and working; and, once the contractors are done, to move the sawmill into a fairly dry location near the middle of whatever remains of the wood.

## Conclusion and plan

1. I should get the sawmill (without trailer) now.
2. I should start to extract and saw logs.
3. I should make a trestle for the sawmill as an early priority.
4. I should weatherproof the east end of the cattle shed this winter.
5. Lucy will need timber for her cabin this winter.
6. A shed for the head end of the mill is next priority.
7. A drying shed is then an early priority.

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