With your own mill, you can cut local softwoods to frame buildings and you can saw up local hardwood logs for mantles, doors, paneling and other house trim, or to make into furniture. Also, if left exposed to view inside the building, over-sized beams and rough-cut boards will give your home a rugged, hand-hewn look. You just don’t get to take the wood chips home with you.īoards left rough and splintery but full sized may be a tiny fraction of an inch out of true, but they can save you time and wood, as you can space larger boards further apart. You pay for the wood that was in the “kerf,” the cut in the log that gets turned to sawdust, and for the thin shavings removed to finish the rough board smooth. That may be how it comes off the log as “actual-measure” rough lumber, but once kiln-dried and planed smooth (so every piece will be same-sized and true in all dimensions), the board is only 1 X 3/4″ thick and 3-1/2″ wide. The board that’s called a 2 x 4 is no longer an honest 2″ thick by 4″ wide. Nearly all framing lumber is a puny 1-3/4″ thick. I’d have had to order them custom-sawed since clear fir or spruce “dimensional” construction lumber comes stocked only in thicknesses and widths calculated to produce the cheapest stick-built house frames. So, one advantage of having your own mill is cutting out the delivery middleman and eliminating the cost of shipping lumber all the way to you, which means saving money - a whole lot of money if you have a house, barn, or similarly large structure to raise.Īnother appeal of your own mill is that you can cut lumber to any size you fancy The squared logs for walls and oversized timbers I wanted to use for rafters and floor joists were not sold at any building-supply outlet. A 2″ x 10″ x 12′ board used for roof beams or floor joists costs around $15. A common construction-grade, kiln-dried, 8-foot 2 x 4 wall stud increased in price by another third just last winter to about $3.50 in some places. First, if you work with wood, you know how lumber prices have gone through the roof lately. You might ask why anyone would want their own sawmill. I am by no means an expert on sawmills, but I am happy to share with MOTHER EARTH NEWS’ readers what I have learned the hard way about how to build a sawmill, by “just doin’ it.” ![]() However, when it came time to square logs and cut extra-thick floor joists and roof beams, I found the most practical and economical way to get it done was to design and build my own mill … from scratch and on site. The author didn’t know how to build a sawmill per se, but learned by doing while drawing up these homemade sawmill plans.īefore I decided to build my family a log house in the woods of central Georgia, I’d had no experience with a sawmill or any association with the sawyers’ trade. Home Organization News, Blog, & Articles.Energy Efficiency News, Blog, & Articles.
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