Mobile saw milling of Larch

Mobile Saw Milling of Larch

We have recently been mobile saw milling Larch roundwood into dimensional sawn timber for a customer. At this particular site we were able to set up the mobile sawmill close to where the logs had been stacked at the woodland edge. There was room to lay down a long set of bearers perpendicular to the sawmill rails. With some help from the Estate, a forwarder loaded the Larch roundwood onto the bearers, which was capable of holding 40-50 logs at a time. The logs had been stacked ride side for quite a while, which made it easy to remove the bark. That extra bit of time taken to remove the bark enabled more timber to be milled before needing to resharpen the saw blade tips.

Larch sawlogs stacked ready for milling, Devon

First batch of milling

We have completed the first batch of Larch, which was just over 23 cubic metres of overbark roundwood. These sawlogs came from a long narrow compartment, which meant there was a disproportionate amount of edge trees in the batch. We orientated the logs to get the best sawn timber for the customer, leaving the worst of the knots on the spine side and on the underneath side of the log.

From this…

Old Larch sawlogs left ride side, Devon

To this…

Our mobile saw milling has created a good volume of sawn timber, which has been bound ready for collection.

Stacks of sawn Larch timber at the woodland edge, Devon

Some of the logs that were from the first section of the tree had a lot of tension, fluting and taper. Despite having greater volume the recovery rates were in fact lower than sawlogs from the next cut section.

Mobile sawmill cutting 38mm by 150mm Larch boards

Remains of sawlog spine and slab after milling timber from it.

We are now working on the second smaller batch of logs, so nearly done with this contract. For our next couple of projects will be milling some Oak, Sweet Chestnut and a bit of European Larch.