Appalachian hardwood prices

Re: Appalachian hardwood prices

Barry Irby

Bill, this is a seemingly stupid question....What is the unit of measurement? IE $300 a What?

The reason I ask is I stopped on the side of the road they were widening and looked at some nice poplar logs and asked what they wanted for them. The Answer was $300. I said, "for all of them?" Their answer was Yes, $300 per hundred board feet. I had never heard of selling lumber per hundred board feet.

Re: Appalachian hardwood prices

Bill Tindall, E.Tn.

standard unit is 1000 bdft. Who ever you talked to misspoke.

Thanks, that is what I thought.

Question

Jesse Cloud

A bit OT here, but I can't help but wonder. How do they calculate the number of board feet in a log - a tapered cylinder? I know that 500 bdft in a log produces way less dimensional lumber and I assume there is no attempt to calculate yield at this stage. The math for calculating the volume of wood in a tapered cylinder is way more complicated than in dimensional lumber.

So how is it done in the industry?

Thanks!

practical log measuring and yield

Bill Tindall, E.Tn.

There are several answers to your question. There are several means of estimating the amount of wood in a log. Which gets used depends on the circumstances of the measurement. European practices may differ substantially. Western softwood and pulp practices will differ substantially. When Richard was preparing his book I found his European experience was misleading for describing our hardwood practices. Here timber is plentiful and labor and capital expensive. Mills don't try to tease every bdft from a log so the relationship between actual volume of a log and its bdft estimate and yield are not exactly correlated, nor do they need to be.

Practical for eastern hardwood:

The log taper is irrelevant. Mills have no means of dealing with lumber shorter than 8' unless it is walnut. Logs are measured from the small end and sawed from the small end. Whatever the taper, and yield of boards less than 8", it winds up in the chipper and becomes paper.

It doesn't matter what the formula is for converting a log diameter to expected yield. Any error between measurement and actual yield is compensated in the price per bdft for the logs. In the end the buyers experience is used to determine what profit can be recovered from a log or this or that diameter.

Timber scales:

There are three formula for estimating lumber yield from log measure- International, Scribner and Doyle. A 14" x 16' log measures 136, 123, and 100 bdft respectively by each measure. Eastern hardwoods are always measured by Doyle and the formula is, assuming a 1/4" saw kerf

bdft =L (D-4)e2 /16

where L and D are length and diameter of log and e2 indicates the quantity in () is squared. This formula grossly under estimates the actual yield of small logs and over estimates the yield of large logs. But this error is accommodated by the experience of the mill buying the logs so that the log buyer knows what can be paid per bdft averaged over hundreds of logs and turn a profit on the sale.

Profit hinges way more on the expected quality of the yield than the actual yield because the selling price of the high grade lumber is 2-3 times the price of the lower grades.

PS  My Article

Bill Tindall, E.Tn.

I have a series in the Articles section on "Where Hardwood Lumber Comes From. Log measuring is illustrated there.

Re: Question

Barry Irby

I had fingers poised over keyboard to answer and realized Bill would answer soon and much better than I could and he did.

Look up the Doyle rule or one of them and you will find it looks like a excellent yard stick with a hook on the end and chart on the side. The buyer hooks it across the small end and taking the length into account reads the chart to get board footage.

Actually he is relying on hopefully vast experience at the same time and it grading the log, looking for felling damage, how straight, crotches, limbs, knots, rot, etc. The rule may become a device for warding off angry sellers or a dapper accessory.

The waste in the process "kills" me. I like the thought that it gets turned into paper or something useful. As an aside, there is a mills near here that has gotten into the business of accumulating Lignin Vitae and sawing it. I asked if they had a scrap I could make a box out of one the lathe or maybe a mallet head, yes, but there is a price on each. They clean the mill scrupulously before sawing and capture everything, including the sawdust. They said they sell the sawdust to the cosmetics industry.

There is a tree service operations yard I have the opportunity to observe almost daily. They bring in urban logs of almost every size. I see oak logs 2 to four feet in diameter regularly. Occasionally logs of almost any species. They try to sell them to local mills for enough money to cover fuel and labor, but often struggle to find a place to dump them without costing them a fee and lots of travel. I know a young man close by with a band mill. It's all I can do not to take the logs and cover myself up in hard wood.

maybe confusing log rule with lumber stick

Bill Tindall, E.Tn.

In my experience log rules look like folding rulers. The log diameter is measured from the small end inside the bark.

Re: practical log measuring and yield

Sgian Dubh

"When Richard was preparing his book I found his European experience was misleading for describing our hardwood practices."

Do you really think my text is misleading, Bill? In my book Cut & Dried, I undertook a couple of comparisons of estimated yield using the Hoppus Foot methodology (old UK method, said to be defunct) versus the Doyle Scale used in parts of the US.

To do this exercise I pointed out in the text assumptions made about the dimensions of the theoretical sample logs under discussion, and then went on to provide a couple of examples of how divergent were the calculated yield that the two scaling systems (Hoppus and Doyle) provided.

The purpose of the text and the sample calculations was primarily to illustrate that different yield estimating systems provide different results, and that neither system I discussed in some detail (and by extension, other systems, e.g., Scribner) could be counted upon to provide a dead nuts accurate number.

I thought I'd succeeded in that, but maybe not going by what you said above. Slainte.

Re: practical log measuring and yield

Bill Tindall, E.Tn.

Do you really think my text is misleading- no

Read what I actually wrote and you quoted.

What you wound up publishing is a ways from where you started researching.

Glad I asked!

Jesse Cloud

Thanks to all contributors. I learned a lot.

I am always fascinated by the difference between theory and practice.

Its enlightening to know both "what the book says" and how its actually gets done!

Re: practical log measuring and yield

Sgian Dubh

"Read what I actually wrote and you quoted."

Ah, sorry Bill. I misinterpreted what you'd written. I see your meaning now. Slainte.