Effect of Sawing Variation on Hardwood Lumber Recovery—Part II: Board Count

Sawing variation (SV) describes all variations that exist in the production of lumber due to machine, material, set works, feed works, and cutting parameters. The necessary oversizing of board thickness due to SV diminishes sawmill profits and hence efforts must be made to reduce the variation. However, such efforts are costly and sawmill personnel generally do not know at which point efforts to reduce (SV) become more costly than oversizing the boards. In an accompanying paper we examined the impact of SV on lumber volume recovery and found that volume recovery increased comparatively more for thinner than for thicker kerfs and that the effect of reduced SV became more pronounced as diameter increased. In this second manuscript, the effect of SV on the quantity of boards sawn for a range of hardwood log diameters using the US Forest Service's LOg ReCovery Analysis Tool sawmill simulation software was researched and compared with the volume improvement from an earlier paper. Results showed that significant differences in the number of boards obtained was dependent on the log diameters sawn, the lumber target thickness, and the change (reduction) in SV. A minimal average recovery improvement of 3 percent due to reduced SV was observed across all kerf thicknesses, equating to a potential production value improvement of $336,000 for an 8 million board feet mill. All sawmills can benefit from reducing SV, but mills that saw large-diameter logs might consider pursuing SV reduction more aggressively than a sawmill sawing mostly small-diameter logs.