At Free Country Designs of Sterling, Virginia, our expert sawyers offer portable sawmill services. We can come to your land or job site to custom mill your logs into lumber for any size project. Our clients range from property owners who lost a tree due to storm damage, construction, or pests to woodworkers and artisans who know the value of milling, drying, and processing your own lumber.
Our Woodmizer Lt 40 Super wide can mill logs up to 36 inches in diameter and 21 ft long. This sawmill is designed to produce lots of board feet of lumber quickly. With a maximum capacity of 675 board feet per hour we can assure the most efficient use of billed time.
What to Expect
Each milling job is unique and based on the following:
- Lumber type
- Desired dimensions
- Site accessibility
The amount and quality of your lumber starts with how the trees are cut.
For the best quality lumber, logs should be milled soon after they are felled. We can saw logs that have been down for any length of time, but the quality of the lumber begins to suffer after a while. Checking is the term used for cracking on the ends of the logs after they have been drying for some time. This results of lost board feet of lumber yielded from your logs.
The middle of the log will stay wet for a long time, but the ends of the logs will dry very quickly, causing cracking and shrinking. Seal the ends of the logs as soon as possible. You can use a product called AnchorSeal or even just regular paint.
This will help stop checking on the ends of the logs.
Some logs, especially yard trees can have metal objects embedded in them. We will use a metal detector and do our best to find these before hand but wood is very dense and even the best metal detectors can only read a few inches deep into the log. In the case of metal it will damage the saw blade. Saw blades are charged to the customer at a price of $30 per blade. Saw blades that get dull from use are at no charge to the customer.
If we bring our sawmill to you, we must have enough open space to work. We typically place our sawmill beside the logs, and the logs are rolled to one side of the mill, where the smaller ends of the stacked logs should face our sawyer. The logs are then lifted onto the bed of the sawmill. Boards produced to your specifications are removed from the tongue end of the mill.
We can also use your logs to make stickers if you need them. Stickers are the square sticks placed between the cut wood to space them apart so air can flow in between the logs during the drying process.
We can provide an estimate of how much your lumber might be worth and how much it will cost to mill it. We will also answer your questions about the milling process. For our portable sawmill services, we charge $75 per hour plus a travel fee.
Call now or email Carl@freecountrydesigns.com for more information and to receive a free quote on our portable sawmill services.