Free Country Designs of Sterling, Virginia, offers sawmill services to meet the needs of customers throughout the region. Our expert sawyers have decades of experience working closely with customers to provide the highest quality lumber from your trees. We can custom saw logs for any project. We have two bandsaw mills, a slab flattening machine, and a vacuum kiln all on site.
Equipment
For logs up to 34 inches in diameter, we use the Wood-Mizer LT40 Super bandsaw mill. It cuts at the amazing rate of 675 board feet per hour. This saw is made to produce quickly. It is also portable and can be taken to your job site, saving you the time of transporting your logs to our location.
With the Wood-Mizer LX 250 bandsaw mill, we can cut extra-wide logs, slabs, and boards with a 55-inch maximum log diameter and 54.5-inch maximum width of cut. This mill is not as fast as the LT40 Super, but it meets a specific need for extra-wide live edge slabs. This bandsaw mill is able to handle almost any local tree on the east coast. The ability to saw up to 54.5 inches wide in a single pass also lets us get a great crotch figure in one piece. With most smaller mills, the crotch figure would need to be trimmed down, losing all that beautiful, desired character.
What to Expect
The key to having a great experience using our sawmill service is to know what to expect. Our expert staff can answer questions and begin preparing for your job by exchanging emails, phone calls, and text messages up to several weeks in advance of the jobs. Sending pictures is a great way to give our sawyer a visual picture of your situation.
Some of the details we need from you include the following:
- How many logs are to be milled?
- How big are the logs?
- What species are the logs?
- How long have the logs been on the ground?
- Are nails, pieces of wire fence, or foreign objects like rocks in the logs?
- Are the logs clean?
- What type of lumber would you like?
- Will there be a helper to aid in handling the lumber?
For the best quality lumber, logs can be milled when they are still green, which means within a few weeks of being felled. But logs can be sawed regardless of the length of time since they were taken down. If you are going for a certain look characteristics like spalting which gives more figure to the grain will develop in logs that have been sitting for some years already cut. If you want to use the lumber to make cabinets, furniture, or other interior wood projects, it will need to be dried first. We offer vacuum kiln drying onsite as an alternative to air drying lumber which can take years to dry our vacuum kiln services can take only a few weeks to complete. Kiln drying also offers the ability to get wood to a lower moisture content than is possible with just air drying. At Free Country Designs, we offer lumber kiln drying services for this purpose. Visit our
Kiln Drying Services page for more information.
Our expert sawyers are happy to answer any questions you may have about the milling process. Call now or email Carl@freecountrydesigns.com for more information and to receive a free quote on your next sawmill job.