Log home idea - sawmill for sale?

Would take quite awhile to dry green logs, squared or round. Log building involves leaving lots of settling room around windows, doors, other openings. Logs/lumber do not shrink much in length but do shrink a lot in width, maybe 4-8" in an 8 foot wall depending on the kind of wood.

Other than that, many people have bought a sawmill to build their homes, either with logs squared or with lumber. I bought my Woodmizer from a fellow who bought the mill new, built his home, did custom sawing for others while building, and then sold the mill. Be wary of a "cheap" mill, especially a cheap circular blade bill. These things are dangerous. Mine is a bandsaw mill and much safer. There are good forums on the web relating to sawmills, good discussions on the pros and cons of various mills, mill operation, sawing and drying lumber, etc. Also, a good bandsaw mill can do many things.

With my mill, among other things, I have produced framing lumber for an addition to our house; made trim lumber and then moldings for doors, windows, etc.; made solid wood plank flooring from 12"-18" wide; made lots of 1" paneling lumber; sold lumber to local carpenters for trim/finish work (they won't buy framing lumber because needs to be graded to meet code/mortgage requirements); made quite a bit of custom furniture and cabinets from cherry, oak, pine, birch and butternut with lumber from logs; resawed salvaged lumber; and did custom log sawing for others. Plus, the slab wood from the logs feeds my Tarm boiler.

Do your homework -- don't make a snap decision. I researched mills over about a 6 month period once I had decided to buy one. Never regretted the purchase of the used Woodmizer.

Jim, how long do you need to air dry the trim and floor stock?

Time to air dry depends on temperature, humidity, wind conditions and type of wood. You also need to sticker it correctly and weight the top to minimize twisting/warping etc. That said, where I live, during summer it will take about 6-8 weeks to air dry pine cut to 4/4 or 1", longer for thicker stock. I will air dry oak or similar woods all summer, and then store inside over the winter, before using.

Air dried wood to be used for finish trim and finish floor, after planing and edging, needs to be brought inside to stabilize with the inside environment and bring moisture content (MC) down even lower. This means at least 2 weeks storage with air circulation in the building where it will be installed. In our local climate air dried wood will dry to about 10-11%. For inside work MC should be about 5-6% in our area. Most interior work I try to do over the winter when humidity is the lowest and the wood is the driest. Excess MC results in shrinkage in length and splitting/cracking. Even with my 18" wide finish pine floor boards, not a single one has split or cracked. Of course, assembly methods also greatly affect whether boards will split or crack.

Kiln dried wood is not necessarily better than air dried, as it too needs to be stored inside and acclimated to the building where it will be used. It takes on or loses moisture from the ambient surroundings. Kiln drying has an advantage for woods with sap that can run, as kiln drying normally raises the temperature sufficiently to set the sap. Air drying will not accomplish this.

For finish floor, furniture, etc., it also is impt to apply the varnish or finish coatings to both sides and the ends of the boards to insure equal absorption of moisture and equal expansion and contraction.

Thanks Jim, I'm going to give home sourced/made trim a try this winter.

For the right guy, it's a fantastic idea.
I had a real small one, pulled logs out of the woods
and made a 10x20 chicken coop, 30x60 barn addition, 600
bushel corn crib, storm window frames, hired out to others,
built a screened summer home for a customer, sold it
for more than I paid, all in a three year time span.
If I had it to do over, I would but with a bigger saw.
Do your homework and have fun.

I paid $14,000 for my used Woodmizer. The first tree I felled and cut into lumber was a large white pine, damaged in a storm. I got more than 1000 bd ft of quality lumber out of that tree, including 18" wide flooring planks. Also sold a large quantity. All in all, estimate $1000 from that single tree. But be cautious, you need a market or a need; else all you have is firewood.

I paid $500 for my little bandsaw mill and sold it for $1200.

Jebatty, do you still have the woodmizer?

There's a way to build log homes without worrying about settling issues. It's called butt and pass, pin to center style. In fact, using this method, it's better to build with green logs. It's easier to pin and the way a log shrinks, it makes the log tight on the pin. Get on loghomebuilders.org and check it out. Look at some of the student houses that are on there.

But to give you a little better explanation: when a log dries out, it shrinks toward the center of itself. It doesn't shrink very much in length. Say for an example a log of 12" in diameter shrinks 1/2" in a few years (depends on species)If you have 10 logs stacked on top of each other to make a wall, there's a chance that wall will be 5" shorter in a few years if the logs weren't dried before building. That's why a lot of log home companies use a settling space built on top of windows and doors. When a log home is built using the pin to center method, the log is predrilled and a 1/2 rod or rebar is pounded through the predrilled log and down, only to the center of the log underneath it. The next log on top is done the same way and so on. Most people that use this method use 1/2" rebar and place them every 2-3' apart. It's a lot of rebar, but that's what gives the structure the support that it needs. I've been researching this method for a few years now and have found a lot of small websites that belong to individuals that have built this way. From what I've read, it seems that most walls built only shrink to whatever the very first log will shrink.

check out paulandellen.com click on the picture and then look at his photos starting from 1991.