Thread: English Oak FS

Considering that the tree would cost about $6k+ to remove and mill, you might be scratching.

Just a tip/guide for those wanting to sell trees. I've dabbled a bit in buying and selling trees, logs and milled timber, some of it suburban salvage and some of it out of the bush. Mills around here pay $70 per cubic metre of log maximum for sought after species. That's for a tree standing in a paddock that they can easily cut down and take away. I've got a mate who's a supervisor for the largest vegetation management contractor in Australia, often when he removes a single tree from a tricky suburban setting the bill runs into the high single digit thousands. As you can see there's a large gap between what a tree costs to remove, what it's worth in the round and what it's eventually worth once it's been felled, the trash disposed of, transported, milled, dried, stored and eventually sold.

Mick

Originally Posted by journeyman Mick

Just a tip/guide for those wanting to sell trees. I've dabbled a bit in buying and selling trees, logs and milled timber, some of it suburban salvage and some of it out of the bush. Mills around here pay $70 per cubic metre of log maximum for sought after species. That's for a tree standing in a paddock that they can easily cut down and take away. I've got a mate who's a supervisor for the largest vegetation management contractor in Australia, often when he removes a single tree from a tricky suburban setting the bill runs into the high single digit thousands. As you can see there's a large gap between what a tree costs to remove, what it's worth in the round and what it's eventually worth once it's been felled, the trash disposed of, transported, milled, dried, stored and eventually sold.

Mick

All absolutely spot on. As some of you know, my business is timber salvaged mostly from urban settings. I don't pay a cent for logs, simply because the cost of disposal of logs for the lopper is so high that I am constantly knocking back good ones for lack of room, but also because the recovery of logs and transport to my yard is often quite expensive. It can take a couple of hours work with a crane truck to recover a log in a backyard or even a park with poor access and then they have to be milled, which leads to the next set of problems - contamination and unseen rot. On one recent log which I had milled for me by sigidi because my own mill was too busy and I needed the room, there were 40+ nails that we hit and that was from a log that had been 7m or so in the air before being cut - the butt log was no good cause it was rotten. Say goodbye to 3 sawblades and a slabbing chain. Then there's the cost of disposing of the waste, and the cost of storage/drying and treating with borax, etc..

In the end, a log isn't worth a cent to me unless it is an exotic species (which is why i bought in tassie stuff), it is from the bush and hence has no nails (not always a safe bet, but not bad) and it is delivered to my yard. Even then, it's not worth much more than cartage unless there are a heap of them. No wonder I'm going bald!