I'm talking with a seller who has red oak dead and standing to harvest. I think most of his sales are cut/split wood but he also sells rounds and logs. He will fell and cut logs to the length I want. My general preference is to buy logs and do the cut/split/stack myself, but I'm not clear on how to best agree on pricing. What's the best way to buy logs so that I get what I pay for and he gets paid for what he sold?
I'm thinking of using my car hauler trailer. It's 18' long and can handle 5500lb payload. If I could get a truck that big I don't think I could unload it. It would have to have its own grapple arm.
5500 lbs of logs is about two small sized oak trees... I bent the axle on my 6K lb payload landscape trailer hauling 14' logs.. people don't realize how much a 20" oak tree wet, by 16'-18' long weighs... http://www.woodweb.com/cgi-bin/calculators/calc.pl
Looks like that one is on the back. If they're delivering logs, they should have a a grapple. All of the log haulers around here do. If I'm out on the road and don't see at least one load of some kind of logs, it's an odd day.
Assuming you are getting enough to fill a log truck you can hire someone to truck it and offer the supplier the difference from what a log load goes for in your area?
Weigh it if you have that available. One prob is if it is dead standing it will be dry'ish and that goes against the seller if sold as the local weight wood price. Knowing what your local loggers sell weight wood for is good info also . That can vary from you have a way to off load or they have a dump truck. What you have available to load and unload matters also. Is this by hand or do you have a way to load? If you have no way to load maybe price someone to dump truck it. You load the wood and the dump truck goes to your place and dumps.
Im thinking this is not a bad way to judge the load. We have a firewood dealer by us that sells unseasoned oak for $65.00/ton delivered, but that's cut and split. This guy may know how much weight is on the truck and 5,000 pounds per cord for unseasoned oak is pretty close. I heard oak can weigh a little more than 5,000#'s/cord if its soaking wet though. Still a good double check. Other species weigh more or less, but that info is available.
Its a great price but this is a rural, very heavily wooded area and it's unseasoned, it will weigh a lot less if it were seasoned. Still a good price though. I think you need to buy 2 cords for the delivered price.
Since you're only going to be getting a few trunks at a time, you could take a few measurements from each piece (top diameter, bottom diameter and length) and run them through the formula for the volume of a truncated cone. Awhile back I made a spreadsheet to do this. It assumes 90 cubic feet of solid wood per cord. I'd upload it here, but this website won't accept spreadsheets.
I try to pay $35-$40 per cord in the round cut to 18" lengths and I pickup a little over a cord at a time. Look closely at the ends of the rounds and inspect the rings. Dead trees even oak can be real punky and there will be some loss.
Very very true. I had what ended up being a split 1.5 cord of wet red oak on my trailer earlier this year and it made a flat spot on the jack wheel. That same trailer sat in the garage with a car on it for years and never did that. I'm guessing I had about 7500 on it plus the weight of the trailer which is rated for 7k. It didn't look like much on the trailer either.
This was the load that did it once I disconnected it from the truck. The biggest rounds were 22" and most were 18 or 19..
As of today this is not a drill. The tree guy up the road finally called me back and he has a couple dozen logs out back in ash, maple, and oak. He wants me to pick out which ones I want and tell him what I want to pay. He will use his flatbed/grapple truck to deliver to my place just a few miles away for no extra fee. He wants it gone before winter really sets in. Some logs are 3' across. At first I was thinking just the 2'rs but now I'm thinking I should buy the whole lot and figure out how to cut the big ones later (could be a perfect excuse for that 2nd saw!) As far as I can tell, those are all good woods for firewood. Being an engineer, and not having scales between him and me, I'm thinking of taking measurements and making an estimate on total cordage like Jon1270 suggests. I also want to be plenty fair because his location suggests we could do good business in the future. So here are the key questions: - About what value is a cord of uncut, unsplit, unseasoned wood compared to the cut, split, seasoned price? Obviously it's lower because I have to buck, split, and season to get final product. Around here a good CSS cord of hardwood is $180. - In my area, I expect the oak is white or red, and the maple could be Norway, Sugar, or Silver. We also have black and white ash trees. My first reaction is to treat all of them as fairly good stuff and not try to worry about which logs are which. Is this reasonable?
Around here a lot of the tree service guys get $100 for a single axle dump truck load of logs 12' to 16' long, comes out to about 2 cord. So that comes out to $50 a cord, delivered.
