Starting a Sawmill Business from the Ground Up | Tour of Ruben Custom Sawmill

hey everyone my name is matt welcome to my backyard it's beautiful kind of fall day we're starting to see some some colors change out here and i have something special and a little unique for you today uh the folks over at idri they make vacuum kilns i reached out and asked if i want to do a feature or a highlight on one of their owners so today we're going to visit matt rubin and he's going to tell us about his journey of how he got from the beginning to where he is now matt does custom song drawing and furniture so the whole spectrum of things so we're going to see how that all progressed we're going to check out his vacuum kiln and see how that kind of works and uh he's actually loading it today so i'm bringing over some some slabs this is the silver maple with a hole and uh we're gonna dry some of this to kind of fill out his uh his load which is gonna go in there so let's uh let's head over there now it's actually not that far matt's only about 15 miles south of me so i have been actually meaning to go visit him for a long time so this is this is perfect let's go for a drive all right so to the other end of the county i'm here with matt matt thanks for having us today appreciate you coming out really nice you to make the time to show us around and humor me with all the giddiness i'm gonna have looking around all your toys yep so i want you to tell us about who you are and uh what you do yeah my name is matt rubin uh we're here in denmark township minnesota which is kind of where the saint croix and mississippi meet and uh three years ago i started a sawmill business from scratch so that's kind of what we're going to talk about today and see where the business is at so i do portable milling custom projects and then i have a vacuum kiln for my drive so that's kind of the the main thing of the business is selling slabs projects and milling for people so i guess we'll just talk about that and look around right yeah so you basically you're doing like the whole the whole thing the whole thing from tree to whatever that's really cool so how did you get started with this uh what made you feel like i should start like doing stuff with logs and trees and stuff yeah i i wanted to start a business so we have a five acre hobby farm here it's all old buildings and we have an old house that we i think we think we're gonna fix it up but so i had this thought of oh okay i need to start a business to get some extra income for my family and all these projects that i want to do i thought about selling chickens i thought about doing a christmas tree farm and then one day i was on youtube and found a one-man sawmill operation with nathan of out of the woods and just started watching his videos and i said okay that's what i'm gonna do okay that's what i'm gonna do so i didn't i'd never sought a lie before i had taken woodworking class in high school i and at the time when i bought my sawmill the only other tool i had for woodworking was a bosch jigsaw and a really crappy table saw that has now been junked so what sawmill would you buy to start with i bought the wood mizer lt40 okay you like got like a real one yeah yeah my wife said get a good one otherwise it's not gonna be worth it good answer yep so she she helped me with that a lot she said she just said go for it so that's how it started then did you have any way to like uh get logs or how are you doing that or that happened before did you like find a bunch of logs first and be like i gotta cut these things or do you get a sawmill first and then go find logs like i said i just jumped in so i got the sawmill first didn't have a single log the first piece of wood that i ever cut was off a branch on my tree over there by the sawmill and after that i started cutting down some of my dead trees on my property the i'd never cut down a tree before so i had to go back on youtube to figure that out the first the first big tree i cut down was about 30 feet from my house and i said okay well if i was in the house no big deal so i cut it down and landed it where i where it should have went but that's that's how that started and then i just spent the entire summer of 2018 collecting logs and finding people that would get me logs so it's been about three years three years little over three years yep that's quite impressive yeah in three years yeah and it was all just on a whim and then just kind of winging it as i go and then uh part time so um for three years i was just kind of doing whatever i could in the spare time that i had to get things in place yeah so then you just went to be full-time three three months ago three months ago yeah so tell us about that jump how'd that feel uh yeah going full time it was a thought that i had actually exactly one year ago um the reason for that one year ago in october i had probably the the best sales month that i've had up until now and that's when i thought okay now i think i can actually do this full-time and be sustainable because of all the equipment that i had the only missing piece was having the the big router table which i got in in june of this year so once i got that in place it was pretty much just i just had a feeling one day when i went into work that that was going to be the day to quit and the funny thing is my boss asked me that day how's how's business going i said it's going really good um but i can't keep up and then two hours later i went into his office and said i'm sorry but i'm done i can't do it anymore i mean i knew it was coming it just it was just a matter of time and i could just feel it building up inside like it was it was freaking pretty rough to to know that you can do it on your own but you're kind of just you're not quite sure if it's the right decision but it has been so far and it's been awesome for these first three months all right so let's go on a tour so when i first started collecting logs all the logs get dumped in the driveway i didn't have the skid steer which i now have for two years so i would collect logs dump them in the driveway and then chain them and drag them to the mill and roll them up on the mill however every way i could do it so that's how that started it's been all cleaned up now if you come this way we've got all these different buildings there's like 11 different buildings on this property none of them are in great shape but we're working with it so this actually used to be an old pig barn from what i found out from the previous owners this is my current workshop it's not very big but i've got enough space to do some projects i've got pretty much all the tools in here that i can i can handle so it's about 13 foot wide and 30 foot long and so i have the biggest piece of machinery in here is the 25 inch helical head planer which has been awesome for me and that's my way of planing slabs for customers to get them ready so i sold a lot of wood just out of this little tiny shop it used to be stacks and stacks of wood in here and this is where i'd have my sails especially in the winter because i can heat it with the old stove that we have from the house so that's kind of the origin story on how that worked so for now i'm trying to keep every all the wood out and have it in other shops other sheds to keep this more of a work area so that's that the next funny story is this solar kiln that i started building exactly three years ago in october this is when i first started selling wood it was i'd sell it wet i'd have to tell people that of course and i'm like i gotta figure out a way to dry wood and i just started the business so i started building this kiln and about a month later after i got it to this state i found eye dry and i said okay i don't want that i want an eye dry so for three years it has just been like a storage shelter we thought about converting into a greenhouse but it's getting taken down very soon so that's the story on that so then over here this is my sawmill shed and i've done some modifications just to this it's just an old 30 36 by 24 shed i took down the wall on the far side to have logs come into the sawmill so that used to be a wall and there also used to be a wall in the front here so that was all torn down and that's where the sawmill sits that's where i mill everything and then if you come inside so sawmill on one end i got a little storage bay in the middle and then on the left side here is my big slab flattening machine from black horse designs and this was a piece of equipment that kind of set me into going full time i had all these nice big slabs dried but i didn't have a way to plane them and i wanted to start doing custom projects dining tables whatever else and this was the machine that got me to being full-time so um it's it barely fits in here but it's it's pretty big it's uh it's pretty big it's 17 feet long and 70 inches wide um it's almost like josh made it just for this space it's it's not a whole lot of extra room around it no so i play in the slabs they go up on the wall and that's that's how i sell my stock right now um i don't have a lot of stock right now it's been going pretty fast um but this is kind of how i'm at right now with with selling slabs and getting customers to pick out projects from them so every single log that i saw for myself i have gone out and got myself i have not had a single person drop off a log for me i've had people deliver logs for their milling purposes but everything that i've sought up has been me going out and getting it so as we go back here i've got a lot of buildings back here too i've got a lot of other stuff that building is almost exclusively used just to park the bobcat that's the watchdog this old building used to be a dog a dog house in there i've got some nice walnut cookies air drying you got to get a shot of that yeah that's an old chicken coop oh yeah there's three of them there's three of them yep i thought it was gonna be full no not yet they all sell fast so a lot of this has just been getting logs and getting them getting an inventory of logs here so again i can feel comfortable of having enough just in process stock to keep the business going that whole pile is walnut um this is a pile for some customers to saw this is a pile of black locust over here to my right that's for a customer those are straight nice straight black locust yeah this is all red oak i believe and that's kind of a pile of random logs that i've collected that i'll probably never get to i think a lot we all have those yeah yeah there might be some good ones in there still i got some hackberry this is a hackberry from the storm that came through a couple of weeks ago these are always so cool like the bark on these things is so like unique i'll say unique i drove by it a few times and then the owner actually called me without me yeah yep and i knew from the street as i was driving by that was a hackberry so we're gonna let this one sit and spalt for a couple years i believe that'd be cool and um we're hoping for some really awesome spalting in that log so yeah just keep moving back here we got some random pine logs that i've collected some of these logs i've pulled out of burning piles like yeah got some poplar logs over here from the neighbor some more white oak and just just just some more random logs and then that's it for the log inventory so oh you got a lot of locks i got lots of room to put them too so that's nice oh yeah and they're shaded which that's nice yeah and my pile is not and super annoying yeah yeah so is this the same saw you had bought three years ago yup this is the same saw um if you come this way i'll show you what i did do it so this wasn't originally a standard lt40 with a 28 inch cut with max and i said that wasn't good enough so i saw canadian woodworks they had modified their mill to make it extendable and i said hmm that's a really good idea so i mentioned it to a few local customers of mine who happened to be woodworkers and they knew a guy just down the road about a mile and a half and he said you got to go see charlie brown so he's a third generation welder and i said hey can you make this wider and he looked at he goes oh yeah no problem 300 bucks i'm like okay so he cut the mill right here added in a 10 10 inch extension roughly so i can cut 37 inches wide now that's awesome and i can still uh trailer it and modify this to go a little wider for the trailering stop yeah you'd never know that uh he did any work on it it's never had a problem since he's done it never had to make any sort of adjustment so if you know a really good welder and you have a mill that you want wider a wood miser i would recommend it it's not that crazy just a piece of steel welded in and i don't know if i'll keep this forever i might i might want to upgrade in the future maybe get uh an electric one once i have a nice shop and stay just stay here uh but i do get a lot of portable requests so it'd be tough to let that go so with portable milling how often do you do that and how does that typically work for people because a lot of i got a lot of questions about you know how do i find someone to come out and cut my logs for me if i have a tree that came down or whatever so what's the best i guess i don't even know what i'm asking other than like walk me through the process of how someone finds you and what it's like to go up there and softer them yeah so most of the time people have never had a sawyer come out they have no idea what the process is they have no idea what they can do with the tree or the log so i kind of have to educate them on you know what's possible based on what they have and then we have to figure out i try to figure out a drying plan for them i can't drive for people because i don't have the capacity but i try to make them understand that that is part of the process so it's not just cutting the logs for them it's really just educating them about the entire process but i'll go out on site um every two or three times a week during the summer during the busy season and most of most of the times it's just a few logs for people so i do have a three hour minimum and then i charge for mileage but um people are just usually really happy to use the trees that they had in their yard and i was actually just down in iowa last week when i milled a five foot oak log um on this thing it was on this thing five foot oak log 34 inches wide once the log was on the mill it was 15 minutes of milling and i drove eight hours and they were the happiest customers i've ever had so it's kind of funny how that aspect of the business works out but it's been kind of fun to just get out on the road and meet people like that so that's where i'm at with that that's really cool so like a lot of the education side of it that's kind of interesting because i guess when people reach out to you they don't really understand like oh i got a sticker and i got to stack it nicely and right they're like oh i just turned this tree into something yeah but there's a lot more most people are honestly very much surprised that they have to dry it yeah i can see that yep or the time that it takes to air dry if that's their route so that's uh it's it's it's fun to talk about it and just understand understand people's perspective on that so yeah that's really cool so the most important part of the business like i just said is drying so i thought about solar drying and thought that was never going to be good enough for the demand i was seeing so that's back in 2018 the end of 2018 i decided i wanted an eye dry but at the time i wouldn't get financed for it so i had to wait another year and this thing came last year i went out to vermont to pick it up myself so we'll just open up the doors and see what's inside this is a 40 foot shipping container it's a high so it's nine feet high and then i insulated all the way around the kiln space so that in the winter it doesn't freeze up and it's a little bit more efficient that way so voila here we go so it's a box inside of a box it's a box inside of a box it's a hot box so yeah that's the front of the kiln uh when we take it out it's on a trolley but i'll show you the back side of it too so we're we cut a little hole here i still got to put a door in but same thing it's it's kind of just hot box i got two inch foam everywhere so this is all electric electric line comes in from the the well house which is right next door and then the water line comes in the bottom and there's the vacuum pump and that's uh that's how everything runs off of the off of the control panel here so right now this this charge has been in here for a little over a week what we're going to do now is we're going to decompress the vacuum so we're just going to hit vacuum release we got we got some wood to put in there so this process of releasing the vacuum and drain the kiln is about 15 to 20 minutes maybe we should check out the water release oh fine yeah we can't miss that this is all the water that came out uh the big one is the vacuum pump water the green bucket is for the daily discharge so i get to kind of monitor how much comes out when it starts to be a trickle i know that the load is probably getting close oh sure that's a good way to kind of indicate how much water is coming out of the wood right yeah so like on a full charge wet wood i'm willing to bet we're getting like 10 15 gallons a day right away that come out i think people understand how much water is inside of wood tremendous amount this is kind of like the winter watering hole for all the chickens and ducks they like to to come over here during the winter and drink the warm water works out good oh that's a lot of water so this is all since when this is from last night at six so what like 18 hours 18 hours yeah all the wood yup okay we've got some maple for duck hill sawmill we've got this those are cool awesome burl for denali woodworks and then this whole stack is all mine charcuterie board stock this is a big seller in the fall time so i had to get this load through yeah so let's uh let's check the the moisture on these maple burls we gotta get that's crazy yeah we're really hoping this is dry because we want to change this load out today but i think if if these aren't dry we'll find a way to get them in the next load nine ten i'd say we're pretty good i wouldn't want to go too much lower with those it looks like they dried pretty nice too i don't see any major cracks anywhere these i think they came in at like 25 moisture roughly and how long they've been in for seven days that's pretty good first day is pretty much a wasted day so it's just ramp up time yeah and then today is like half a day because we didn't have the full full day so more like actual five days of drying we're gonna pull this out that'll be good to go that's gonna need some more time i already know that that was fresh cut um but then these will be good to get in the inventory too so time to unload [Music] [Applause] so so [Music] ah will it hold i don't know we'll find out it seems like it's holding that works it's well it's it's closer now so that was our excitement for the day we're gonna get a moisture reading on these before they go in then we'll start throwing them in there so i'd say anywhere from 14 to 20 somewhere in that range okay on the wetter stuff thanks i was showing off yep smallest slab in the stack here i'll throw it up there [Music] perfect good landing yeah [Music] are you satisfied i'm very satisfied me too that's awesome let's push it in [Music] so just snug [Music] uh as far as drying time like this maple i think you have will it be like four or five days to get it dry i'm gonna i'm gonna keep it in there longer just because you got that big stuff in there anyway yeah so it'll actually equalize a little bit and who knows it might take longer but um and then like the cost to run the kiln it's electric it's uh but between the summer and winter it's four to five hundred somewhere in that range i'm sure how many per month per month so if you can get anywhere from two to four thousand board feet through it in a month it's really really not much at all yeah it's pretty cool it's quick it's quick it's not bad yeah loading and unloading is pretty easy so we'll be back in whenever you let me know and we'll see everything looks i guess yep so thanks for showing us around today and we'll see you in like a week-ish yeah so a week or so yeah maybe a little bit cooler we'll see yeah it's still a little warm might be snowing by then it probably will be mid-october snowfall so one of the awesome things about the vacuum kilns is that they're able to dry things a lot faster than any type of conventional way of drawing with uh with air a conventional kiln dh kiln or like a solar kiln even just air drying those have a certain speed limit that you really can't exceed or else you'll degrade the quality of the wood with the vacuum kilns you can go quite a bit faster without any kind of degradation because of the magic of lowering that boiling point so my slabs will probably be done in a few days so we're gonna head over there next week and unload and take a look at those uh this was too big for matt saw so uh it came home with me it's a big walnut crotch log which we'll cut in the future but for now i will see you next week sometime back at matt's place [Music] all right so i'm back it's been a little longer than i had hoped because i've been tearing apart my house so there's there's that so these have been out for like two or three weeks now two or three weeks they've been sitting outside yeah yeah so we're gonna take a quick look at the moisture content and uh see where things are at uh with this cycle because you were trying to get some moisture out of this big thick stuff we weren't trying to like go super crazy right i'm pulling all the moisture out of here just to kind of bring them down to a little more indoor-ish level yeah so would you end up running for four uh four weeks is that what that's a little over four weeks yeah right and you had a lot of moisture in these big chunk big chunky things yeah it was about uh 10 gallons coming out in the first couple days and then towards the end there was just a very small trickle almost nothing in the last few days so that's when i knew when to pull the load out you should maybe bottle that and like uh i've heard of that wood water yep the newest thing all right so what we got oh we're down around six seven percent which is pretty good for this time of year as we jump into the dry winter months so pretty consistent six to seven so now last time we talked a bit about the i guess the business side of having you know the kiln and the house impacted things and i think the gist of it is that it's really allowed you to you know produce product quicker or get things on the door quicker because your dry time goes down but you're not sacrificing you know quality drying quality right because it's faster the magic of the vacuum right so i guess would you would you do it again would you do something differently with the setup or right away i found out that once i had kiln-dried wood that i would need more capacity so i actually wish i would have bought the bigger model of the eye dry um but i didn't i didn't i didn't really know at the time and i wanted to buy some other equipment along with the eye dry so it's kind of just like uh i don't want to spend that much that that that soon but uh you know a few months of of having the eye dry i was like okay i wish i would have more capacity right so i guess the payback on it is pretty you know quick or reasonable depending on how much volume into you i guess yeah it all depends on how much volume you want to do so like for me it's it's it's almost tough to keep up with the demand i mean towards the middle of this past summer i was i was basically pre-selling slabs wet so people would come over wanting something i wouldn't have it dry but i'd already have it cut and they would pick out that slab and then i'd say okay well i'll get in the kiln when i can sure and kind of work that way so i actually pre-sold a lot of my inventory over the course of the summer and i'm now actually getting it dry and out the door so it helps with that too so you can you can do things a little bit faster that way too and you can uh increase your cash flow right away you know by selling half half of the slab really you know half down early so a lot of different ways to work it but um yeah ultimately i just wish i had more volume it sounds like the uh the volume kind of matches whatever capacity you have yeah it doesn't even matter like if you had a bigger one you probably still want another one probably yep and at that point i might actually want to hire somebody but yeah um yeah thank you so much matt for taking the time and showing us around telling us about your business i know i really enjoyed hearing about it all and i get to geek out and see whatever else is doing out in the world so thank you again for taking the time to show everything and being so open with everything yeah no problem there's if anybody has any questions they can always reach out to me too thank you and also a big thank you to idrive for making this possible if you want to check out their kilns and learn more about their stuff you can check out their website i'll have a link to that down in the video description and i think that's going to do it for this one all right so thank you as always for watching i greatly appreciate it if you any questions or comments about matt's sommel operation you can bother him don't go to him please feel free to leave a comment and we'll be happy to answer any questions you might have and until next time happy working

2021-11-26 20:08

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