Black Walnut trees

[dstryr]

Hi all, new member here.  I am thinning a stand of walnut trees and looking for opinions on the usefulness/demand for smaller logs.  First one down is approx 18" at the base and 12-14" at the top, around 30' long.  Not really worth anything but is there a better use than firewood?     Many trees are 20-35' tall and 3-10' apart so wanted give the best trees room to grow.

[wtnhighlander]

Too small for lumber is still good for turning blanks. And drying before use / sale is optional.

[Chestnut]

Walnut in any form is worth milling into lumber vs burning. A tree like you are describing 12-14" at the small end and lets just say 32 feet long could easily produce 200 BF of lumber. That's like 4 dining room tables or 4 sideboards. How many trees are you talking this size? If your giving them away I'd gladly come take them off your hands... .

I asked a tree service in this area how much walnut logs are worth and on average they go for $0.50-$1.00 BF in log form. Now don't scoff at that there is a lot of effort in sawing and drying lumber. There is also a lot of loss, of that 200 BF there is probably 10-20% drying loss due to cracks warps etc. Ungraded 4/4 walnut boards aren't worth much more than $5-$6 / BF. It's pretty easy to buy 4/4 select and better walnut for ~$7.

There used to be a gentleman that would frequent this site that ran a sawmill. I think he still runs the mill just doesn't frequent the site as often. It seemed like the logs he dealt with the most were no larger than 24" after 32-36" most sawyers don't want to deal with the effort of moving the log.

[Chestnut]

10 minutes ago, wtnhighlander said:

Too small for lumber is still good for turning blanks. And drying before use / sale is optional.

You've been watching too many Matt Cremona videos. 18" large end is my bread and butter. Perfect size for being able to move and roll myself but still yields a lot of good sized boards. If these were 6 foot long logs they might not be worth the effort but 30 footers? If there are 5 of them that's 1,000 BF of decent sized easy to mill logs.

It depends on how strait and how many branches there are though.

[Tom King]

I built our kitchen cabinets out of a Walnut log about that size.