Synopsis: Looking for unusual or interesting boards that you won’t find at the local hardwood supplier’s? You might want to check out one of these boutique sawmills. Usually run by a single person, mini-mills are spread throughout the country and can be filled with unusual local woods at bargain prices. Mario Rodriguez set out to find what treasures were waiting for him within an hour’s drive of his New Jersey home. He shares what he found, profiles three operators, and offers tips for dealing with local sawmills.

As the name suggests, a mini-mill is simply a small sawmill, typically run by a single person. You find them almost everywhere across the United States. Some of them cut with a monster-size circular sawblade, while others do the work with a gi-normous horizontal bandsaw.

But it’s not the machinery that gives mini-mills their appeal. Unlike the big mills that supply lumber to your local hardwood dealer or lumberyard, mini-mills are likely to be a source for unusual and interesting boards—the ones that can make a woodworker’s pulse spike.

Some of these finds will be “exotic domestics,” locally grown woods that show unusual figure or color. Such woods aren’t normally carried by hardwood suppliers because the supply is limited and the demand is light. On the other hand, this is exactly the stuff a mini-mill values the most.

At a mini-mill, you just might discover a gorgeous length of crotchwood for a door panel, a board with exceptional wild grain for the top of an end table, or a stack of rarely available local wood such as apple, buckeye, or pecan. You might even come across a 3-in.-thick slab of your favorite wood that would be perfect for a long-planned dining table.

That’s why I go to mini-mills. They have material you just won’t find anywhere else.

Many of these little sawmills offer custom cutting, so you can request quartersawn boards or special thicknesses. If the mill is mobile, and many are, you can have a log on your property cut to your specs. Or, you can transport a log to their site for milling.

Mini-mills appeal to me for yet another reason. They often offer their stock at bargain prices. Mainly because they have low overhead, you generally can save from 10% to 50% over prices charged by hardwood dealers and lumber¬yards. That’s partly because small sawyers aren’t competing with larger mills for premium logs. Much of their wood comes from landscapers and property owners who are happy to get a felled tree off their property.

From Fine Woodworking #193

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