Have a friend with a 40 ft black walnut.Circumference is about that of an outdoor trash can and the first 20 ft are perfectly straight.Worth anything for stocks? He would like to recoup some of the cost,or best case, have it dropped for the wood. Lives in Ne.Pa. Thanks

First post I see; welcome.
If it is perfectly straight, all the grain will be too; and most sawmills won't take trees from a yard or farm lot; nails.
If you cut it, do not have the pith in any of the blanks; learn the difference in plain and quarter sawn. Most of these trees are used for veneer.
Will ne make any money on it?
No.

I would look around for some one that specializes in walnut.

I would look around for a small mill operator.

Lots of private guys out there.

Making money maybe maybe not and how much is a good question.

I sold 23 walnut trees years back to a sawmill. I got 50% of the per foot price on the stump. Was worth it to get rid of the mess every year.

dpcd nailed it.
Phil

quote:

Originally posted by dpcd:
First post I see; welcome.
If it is perfectly straight, all the grain will be too; and most sawmills won't take trees from a yard or farm lot; nails.
If you cut it, do not have the pith in any of the blanks; learn the difference in plain and quarter sawn. Most of these trees are used for veneer.
Will ne make any money on it?
No.

Yep, the master has spoken.

20 years minumum air cure also.

Been there, done that. Photo from 27 years ago.

I burn 6 cord of firewood per year and walnut is some of my least favorite. It would have to be split and delivered for me to take walnut for free. I really hate the nature of the ash.

Wood-Mizer has a spot in their site to find a local sawyer. It's under services.

black walnut not the most valuable stock wood and only the base and some crotch areas will have fancy grain.
makes good furniture and flooring though
fell it cleanly at waist height and then dig up the stump, that's where most of your gunstock wood will come from.
buck up the felled portion appropriately and paint the ends with wax or similar.
get a guy with a portable mill to come saw the bucked up pieces into four quarter boards. Take the stump and the crotch pieces to a mill with a very large circular saw and get them to cut that into thicker stuff for stocks ... 3 1/2" or 4" thick. Stack those separately, separated by stickers, and wrap the whole stack in visqueen to slow drying and prevent cracking. Assuming you live in a place with low humidity, at least part of the year, stack all of this in your barn for 5 years minimum, the thicker pieces for 10 years. then sell the boards on craigslist to woodworkers and the figured stock blanks on ebay.

If you want to speed up the drying, you can use clear plastic instead of visqueen and put the stack outdoors. In the sun, it will make a little greenhouse and it will dry faster. Buy the best plastic you can get though, otherwise it will disintegrate. And be sure to wax the ends or they will split.

There is a reason stock blanks cost quite a lot of money!

If it’s for your own use you can rip out some good blanks using a chain saw and guide strings. A ripping saw will work better than a cross cut saw. It might take a bit of time, and might not maximise the harvest of timber, but by the time you have loaded it all up and taken in to the mill, or had a wood mizer in to slab it, you would be in to quite a bit of money and time. I haven’t done this on walnut, but have ripped boards out of oak and pine - not perfect by any means but nothing that a decent plane couldn’t sort out.

The blanks you can make would cost you much more than you can by English walnut blanks ready to use. Not an easy way to go broke!!

I owned a sawmill back in 1960 along with my father. We had a 56 inch insert tooth round blade and when you hit iron in a log it would shut down the operation for a couple of hrs to either change the tooth inserts or file the blade on location. If I had to cut any more black walnut trees it would have to be cut off at lease 12 ft up the tree trunk. We had a place to dry the blanks in a barn and my younger
brother had a Masters Degree in forestry. We had tried to save the blanks with a sealing compound, but still lost several blanks by cracks. It was not worth the effert. Horse shoes would be hung on a limb higher up the trunk. We cut large pecans tree and cottonwood trees. Some would be 60 inches in dia. at the base and split with chains saws to be able to put the split logs in the carriage to saw. Some of the large pecan trees had a black strike down the trunk and I made a gun cabinet very colorful.

After I went to TSJC in the fall of 1961 my father changed over to making hard wood pallets under contract for brick companies. No more cutting logs for the public. It keep 5 or 6 men working for several years.

Metal detector will find any nails. Mill guy will charge you $50 for each nail, or something like that.

I would give it a try. The way things are going lumber is always going to keep its value, can't say that for the green pieces of paper we call money.