Manufacturing Yield in Woodworking: From Roundwood to Finished Product
How to chain sawing, drying, machining and finishing yields into one recovery figure, and convert it into roundwood purchases.
Why 55% recovery is not a 55% business
Every wood product factory talks about recovery, but almost nobody sells at the sawmill exit. What ships is the product of every stage multiplied together: roundwood becomes lumber, lumber becomes dry parts, parts become machined components, components survive finishing and packing. Run Manufacturing yield with realistic stage figures - 55% sawing, 70% drying, 85% machining, 95% finishing - and the chain yield is 31.09%. You buy 3.22 m³ of roundwood for every cubic metre that leaves the door.
Stage one: primary breakdown
Converting logs into square-edged lumber is the bloodbath. Slabs, edgings, sawdust and log taper between them leave 40-60% as loss: FAO puts the global average recovery around 50%, EU softwood mills reach 48% and better, small Southeast Asian band mills manage 52% while chainsaw milling drops near 39%. Thin-kerf and twin-blade equipment, correct log sorting and measured overcut policies are where the points come back. See Sawmill Recovery Rate: Benchmarks and How to Improve Yours for the recovery benchmarks in detail.
Stage two: drying
Drying rarely loses volume outright - shrinkage from green to 12% moisture is single-digit percent - but it loses boards: checks, splits, warp and collapse downgrade or scrap material. A well-run kiln charge plans 5-15% degrade depending on species and thickness; refractory hardwoods cost more than spruce. The drying stage yield in Manufacturing yield should reflect degrade, not just shrinkage, and Kiln capacity helps size the charge that keeps degrade low.
Stages three and four: machining and finishing
Machining to final size typically yields 70-90%: cut-off strips, tenon and dado waste, planing allowance already removed in the rough-sizing stage. Finishing and assembly are gentler, 90-97%, but a colour reject at the last step costs the most because every previous stage's margin is buried in it. Track the stages separately - the loss table in Manufacturing yield exists so you fix the biggest leak first, not the most visible one.
Turning yield into purchasing maths
The practical output of a yield chain is the buy number. Divide the delivered volume by the chain yield: an order for 12 m³ of finished components at 31% chain yield commits you to roughly 38.6 m³ of roundwood. Feed the same numbers into BOM cost with your log price and you have the material cost that decides whether the order is worth taking.