Is Milling Your Own Lumber Worth It

Finding affordable lumber has always been a mainstay for woodworkers and when you tie our dwindling natural resources into the conversation the time is right to look at milling your own lumber.

Is milling your own lumber worth it. Once word gets out that you have a sawmill people start calling you to mill for them as well. For a source of lumber as well as a profitable business a portable sawmill can be a key piece of equipment on your farm. Some will want to buy the lumber from you while others want to hire you to. The lumber maker frame itself requires no maintenance.

The seasonal nature of farming means there are slack times as well as times of low income and there are always construction projects that range in scope from replacing a few boards on the front porch to building a barn. Making your own rough lumber without a sawmill probably isn t going to keep you supplied with wood for all your projects but it s still worth doing. The spirit might be willing but milling your own lumber is an expensive time consuming and often frustrating process. Milling your own lumber video series.

I ve always found that the more creativity you put into your projects the more you get out. The saw chain needs to be kept sharp and it will be over seven feet long so chain sharpening is the most tedious part of lumber making. Cause inspection fee and all we re still milling out our own lumber for about one tenth what it would cost us at the local retail lumberyard. The most common reason for buying a small sawmill is to mill lumber for your own projects.

These jobs range from a few boards to building a dog house to a house or a barn. Milling one s own lumber really starts to pay dividends when the species is unusual for the locale for example a healthy american chestnut in manhattan or the cut is something other than plain sawn a white oak log that can be cut to deliver mostly quartersawn boards.