We Built Our Own Sawmill for $600!
Living next to a national forest and seeing all of the timber being removed by large flatbed trucks was the impetus we needed to build our own sawmill.
January/February 1976
By David Hayes and Raymond Hege
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Talk about frustration!
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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.
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. And we had such a great location too: high on a bluff overlooking a quiet river valley.
"What we need," we told ourselves, "are two things: legal access to those trees and our own sawmill."
And, 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. Here's how we did it:
THE NATIONAL FOREST SERVES "LITTLE GUYS" TOO
Before we did anything else, we checked out the availability of all those national forest trees that surrounded our property. (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.)
So we just took a little drive into the areas of forest that the commercial logging outfits were licensed to cut. 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.
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).
So far, so good. 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."
Buoyed 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. 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. Twenty thousand feet! Needless to say, we paid the $15.00 and made the promises.
TO THE WOODS!
Getting those culls out of the forest was easier for us than you might think. 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. And we already had a good chain saw with which to trim and section the trees we selected. And our trusty two ton truck with its 14 footlong bed was all we needed to haul the logs home.
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