Adding real value to timber.

Posted on March 13, 2018

You would probably be surprised if you heard that someone had sold something for £17 to £22 if it is worth £50-£60. You would no doubt question their sanity if it turned out to be worth £300-£375. And yet it is exactly what can happen when someone logs up a piece of timber that is of milling quality! To rub salt into the wound they may have even spent over £8,000 on a firewood processor to turn it into logs when a £3,150 Riko Timbery M100 sawmill would enable them to mill it.

To put it into perspective a piece of timber the size shown if the picture below could be worth as little as £17 as softwood logs or as much as £375 as air dried Oak boards.

A 36cm diameter X 3m felled piece of timber equates to approximately 0.31 cubic meters of timber. If its softwood then sold as logs is worth around £17-£22 (£55-£70M³), if it’s hardwood then sold as logs its worth around £25-£31 (£80-£100M³). However, the same piece of timber can be sawn into four 10cm X10cm X 3m posts & two 25mm X 100mm X 3m boards and as softwood could be worth £50-£60 (£266- £320M³) or as hardwood the value could be £100-120 (£533 -£640M³). If you are prepared to spend the extra time cutting it into Waney-Edge cladding boards, then the total value for Cedar is around £110-£130. If its Oak and you cut it into 25mm X 125mm X 3m boards and air dried, it could be worth £300-£375 (£1,600-£2,000 M³).

A PTO driven firewood processor capable of handling 36cm diameter timber will cost you around £8,000 + vat to earn £55-£100 per M³ of logs. A petrol engine Riko M100 saw mill will cost you £3,150 + vat and could potentially earn you up £2,000 M³.

(NB. All prices quoted were sourced on the internet via a UK search and are therefore not binding).