FIFTH NATIONAI, CONSERVATION CONGRESS 249 



"Not SO with the manufacturer of lumber; he takes the tree as Nature 

 made it and cuts it into commercial shapes and sizes and his process of manu- 

 facture does not alter the characteristics of the raw material nor increase nor 

 decrease its imperfections. This is why it requires a greater exertion of 

 the seller's faculties to successfully market lumber than it does the products 

 in almost any other line." 



Much also depends upon proper logging and sawing equipment. However, 

 the manufacturers of machinery have displayed so much energy and resourceful- 

 ness in its design and capacity, that good equipment is available to every up-to-date 

 lumber manufacturer. 



POSSIBLE SAVINGS 



THE indictment against the lumberman says that if all the waste which 

 occurs in the manufacture of yellow pine lumber were steam distilled, 

 it would yield more turpentine than the annual production of gum tur- 

 pentine. It also says that if all the waste occurring in the manufacture of spruce, 

 hemlock and cottonwood lumber were converted into paper, it would furnish 

 all the paper made from wood each year. Both of these statements are undoubt- 

 edly true; the question simply is, as to the practicability of making the indicated 

 conversions of waste into marketable products. In operations of this sort, a 

 casual observer starts with the assumption that waste material is cheap material, 

 or, in other words, that where small logs, tops, slabs, edgings and trimmings are 

 thrown awajr, the initial cost is practically nothing if they are taken as raw ma- 

 terial for some other process of utilization. Many times this is a serious fallacy. 

 To start with, such material has almost no value" and the timber operator is glad 

 to take a nominal price for it; however, the purchaser finds that to put it into 

 usable form requires such an expenditure of labor that he can better afford to 

 buy merchantable timber for his raw material. The real reason for this is, of 

 course, the present cheapness of timber of nearly all species; every advance in 

 timber prices means the opportunity for increased utilization, but until thorough 

 experiments are made, it cannot be determined just how far the increase in utiliza- 

 tion can go. 



A lumberman whose college training in engineering lines has made him am- 

 bitious to apply all modern methods to his operations, recently said on this point : 



"Our specifications for logging birch and maple are 8" surface clear for 

 birch and 10" surface clear for maple. Since we adopted these specifications 

 the value of birch and maple lumber has increased over $5.00 per M, and 

 it occurred to us that this advance would enable us to cut our logs on a 

 much harder specification, both as to size and character of the log. 



"We made interesting experiments in this line. We reduced our speci- 

 fications to 7" and up for birch and 8" and up for maple and included a fairly 

 hard grade or No. 2 log. This difference in the specification increased the 

 cost of logging from $1.00 to $2.00 per M. The smaller and rougher logs 

 decreased our cut at the mill some twenty per cent with a consequent in- 

 crease in cost of sawing of that amount. The larger percentage of low- 

 grade lumber decreased the average value of the product of the log, so that 

 by endeavoring to utilize the poorer logs in our forests, and thus to decrease 



