Update on RR bridge

Lumber Prices

Mark Mandell - Gone Round In New Jersey

The thought occurs that in the middle of the forest you could harvest trees right there, get a woodmizer to come in/volunteer and you could cut all you need, very likely the way it was built originally. The sweat equity would be very much more valuable than those trips to the yard for more 2x and 4x Doug Fir

Re: Lumber Prices

kneale brownson

Problem with on-site milling: How do you get the lumber treated? Ground/stream contact requires preservatives or they'll be redoing the project real soon.

Why it won't work

Bill Tindall, E.Tn.

you could harvest trees right there. Users of the trail would not be keen on traveling through a logging site.

get a woodmizer to come in. The river bridge restoration will require 20,000 bd ft of timbers ties, and planks. These small mills are not productive. It takes forever to saw 1000 bdft on them. If it was practical to go this route it would require mechanized logging and an efficient mill for sawing. Then what?

The labor on these bridges is about 5X the material cost. The lumber needs to last a long time, which means treated lumber- creosote treatment for the ties to give them a 40 year life and the maximum UC4B treatment of the remaining deck and rail to hope for a 20 year service life.

Either the lumber has to be dry to treat it or it has to be treated in an expensive vacuum chamber to suck the water out as treatment proceeds. The later process adds 40% to cost. Locally the only wood that can be treated without vacuum is poplar. The best wood for treatment effectiveness is southern yellow pine and that is our material of choice. Even big timbers can be KD in a week or two and with its small amount of treatment resistant heartwood it treats effectively.

very likely the way it was built originally. The original bridge timbers are southern yellow pine, often old growth, treated to the core with creosote. Those sheltered are still sound, even though the RR was abandoned in 1983. In fact the only trestle timbers that need work are the trestle feet in locations where it is damp wet. We are allowed to splice new timber onto the bottoms.

Public bridges are governed by a multitude of regulations. I am becoming an expert in bridge code. For a trail of this kind we fall in the cracks between building code, highway transportation code, and trail code, with none in agreement. Materials must be approved, the plans must be approved, the construction firm must be approved and finally the finished product must be approved. When we started the final approval was from a country inspector who did not want to see the trail built. That was difficult and expensive, but now we have neutral inspector.

This trail is one of the few ever built without some level of government backing.

listening to Mike McCoy's channel

David Weaver

I gathered that a lot of the timber processing industry operates in debt and at extremely low margins sometimes.

That's got to make it hard to compete cost-wise unless you're working with donated everything (donated mill time, donated logs, etc).

I'm guessing that some of your structural bits will be cants that include pith, too (not to mention, the creosote - I'll admit that I've applied creosote before, but not in the last 20 years. I wouldn't do it at this point going forward, but it sure is effective).

Re: listening to Mike McCoy's channel

Bill Tindall, E.Tn.

A year ago southern yellow pine structural lumber was about $350/thousand bdft at the wholesale level. As manufactured it is dry enough to treat without further drying. Try competing with these prices with a small mill. Can't.

All this stimulating and staying home has rocketed demand beyond current mill capacity which in turn sent wholesale prices beyond $1000/thousand in January. Sanity will return when mill capacity catches up. Oddly log supply is in over supply with logs exceptionally cheap.

I'd bet the mills...

David Weaver

..will come through this and still have a lot of debt.

McCoy had a frick mill and at one point said he had about 7 employees in NC and could run something like 5-7k board feet through the mill on average (i could be slightly off) but then you had to market it and dry it (presumably that was included with 7 ees) and his kiln ended up burning.

At the same time, a couple of commercial mills popped up with 25 then 50 then 100k ft a day and went $4MM in debt and you couldn't get wood into a furniture factory unless you had someone on staff to grade (otherwise, the factories would have their grader dock your wood to short you).

It just sounded like at the end of the day if you ran great and paid for trucks or trucking or whatever, you could just about feed yourself....as the owner with a wife running logs in the yard (so no direct pay for the spouse).

Can't imagine what the safety protocols are with creosote. I had a relative who loved it and stockpiled it for fencing and posts before it was removed from the private sale market. I repainted some of his old fence that had been dipped (he made a dip tank and dipped all of the outdoor wood on his property). It was already 20 years old and just weathering, and not a big to be found anywhere close to it. Not healthy, but sure effective.