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Remarkable! Ought to post this in the basement. You'd probably get more interesting replies. It is woodworking though - I guess. I think I'd charge him almost that much to take it down.

Why post it in the basement? There's money to be had. Take a look at what one man can do with a chainsaw, a ladder, and a little ingenuity:







$30 grand is high, but even to a logger who rips nothing, that tree is likely worth over $2 grand to the sawmill and another $1 grand to a firewood dealer.

All I see there is a tree that needs to be removed and is good only for firewood, unless maybe there is buried treasure in it.

John

John, have you ever done any logging for a hardwood sawmill? Just curious.

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$30 grand is high, but even to a logger who rips nothing, that tree is likely worth over $2 grand to the sawmill and another $1 grand to a firewood dealer.

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Yeah, but you will need to hire an arborist and crane to get it down, and that will cost you maybe $5,000?

No regular sawmill will want the log, too big, too ugly and probably full of metal.

Sorry but even asking money for the tree is straight out dreaming.

jteneyck said:

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All I see there is a tree that needs to be removed and is good only for firewood, unless maybe there is buried treasure in it.

John

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I'm sure there is "treasure". 100 years worth of assorted metal hardware.

I good logger could easily drop that oak tree without a crane, especially if he had a climber on board his crew or he was a climber himself. Piece of cake.

Where I live a residential tree has zero value to a sawmill; they won't even look at a perfect specimen much less that thing. Dead at the bottom, all kinds of leads coming out of it means it's probably full of knots, what looks like a bird house and something else up high suggests there's metal in it. I mill my own lumber, but even to me that tree is worth nothing more than firewood and I never pay for that. My enthusiasm for milling anything I could get for free quickly disappeared when I hit nails and found logs rotten in the center or full of knots. I look at trees a lot more critically now before getting too excited. There are enough good ones that still come my way, for free, that I have plenty of nice clear lumber to work with.

John

The last (and probably final, i'll never do it again) time I milled lumber was an offer that was too good to refuse. The guy had walnuts in a woods he was clearing. So he brought them out after I felled them, loaded them on his truck, took them to his barn/shop and stored them for a few months. Then in the winter I hired a bandsaw mill to process them and he stored them stickered in his barn for 2 years for me. That was a good deal for me. He did all the work, and I got the lumber. He wanted to see the whole process so and he did not want to see the trees get wasted. I also made about 1/2 the furniture in his house which I cut him a deal on.