INSTRUCTIONS IN TIMBER ESTIMATING 



By Edward C. M. Richards, Ph. B., M. F. 



V»^E of the Senior Class of the Yale 

 r I ^Forest School had always heard 

 ^^^ that timber estimating was a very 

 peculiar part or branch of the lumi)er 

 business. There seemed to be something 

 mysterious about it. We had always un- 

 derstood that the best cruisers were 

 men who had lived in the woods for 

 the greater part of their life and per- 

 haps had even been born there. It 

 seemed hardly possible that a lot of 

 men who had lived in cities and large 

 towns for the most part could reach a 

 point where they could claim even a 

 fair knowledge of the art. For besides 

 the seeming necessity of having to have 

 lived in the woods for the greater part 

 of one's life, still there seemed to be 

 something weird connected with the 

 work. We could not have told just 

 what it was or where we had gotten the 

 impression, but it was there neverthe- 

 less. Imagine our surprise, therefore, 

 when one morning last spring while 

 we were camped along the I. & G. N. 

 Railroad near Trinity, Texas, our in- 

 structor told us that anyone with care- 

 ful attention to detail and a lot of 

 hard, but carefully directed work, could 

 gain a very fair knowledge of cruis- 

 ing as it is done by the best of the 

 men who make it their life work. He 

 said that it was not necessary that men 

 live in the woods all their life to gain 

 skill and accuracy, but that one thing 

 amongst others that men of this class 

 had which fitted them for the work bet- 

 ter was the experience which they had 

 liad as regards the allowance for the 

 defects which are found in timber. This 

 would have to be learned by experience 

 that all of the methods of work and 

 a considerable amount of the skill re- 

 quired to carry out these methods could 

 be learned by us in the time which was 

 allotted for this purpose. 



A fairly brief summary of the course 

 of instruction which we went through 

 is as follows: 



The country about Trinity had never 

 been covered by the Government in 

 their rectangular survey, and, therefore, 

 all of the surveying which had been 

 done had been done in small and very 

 irregularly shaped areas. Some of 

 these surveys were as much as a hun- 

 dred years old and in many cases it 

 was very hard for us to locate the old 

 lines. A regular crew had been at work 

 at this for some time, however, before 

 the estimating started and the boun- 

 daries had assumed a recognizable as- 

 pect in practically all cases. But for the 

 practice work in cruising we laid off 

 two sections of land which were as- 

 sumed to be numbers 1 and 36. This 

 made the line separating them a town- 

 ship line and the east end of this line 

 was the township corner. The lines 

 around these two sections were blazed 

 as were the lines in each, dividing them 

 up into "forties," and ten-acre plots. 

 In this blazing work the trees were 

 blazed on the side facing the line and 

 a single horizontal crayon mark was 

 made on each line blaze. Trees which 

 were directly on the line — "line" trees — 

 were blazed "fore and aft." The cor- 

 ners of the forties were staked and 

 each stake was marked with crayon so 

 as to locate it with regard to its po- 

 sition in the section. Along the lines 

 dividing the sections up into forties, 

 stakes were set at distances of 330, 660 

 and 990 feet from the corners and each 

 stake here was also marked, giving the 

 position as regards its location in the 

 forty. These stakes were for the pur- 

 pose of enabling a compass man run- 

 ning across the forty to check himself 

 up quickly and easily during the prac- 

 tice work. All of this work was done 

 with a steel tape and a staff compass 

 and care was taken to do the work 

 of setting stakes correctly as we all 

 were to use this sample area for some 



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