Sawmill Operation for Dummies

sawmill gang saw

The freelancers who wrote for Demand Media Studios (DMS)¹ were paid a flat fee for their posts, most of the time ten or fifteen bucks for 300 to 500 words. To increase this rather low pay, some performed slapdash research on many unfamiliar topics, resulting in low-quality "information" harvested from questionable sources and reworded by someone who didn't understand what they were writing. That's what must have happened when finance manager Kristy Martz wrote "How Does a Sawmill Work?"² for HomeSteady.com.

Martz claimed to have gleaned her information from the National Hardwood Lumber Association, although that organization's website has no content about sawmills. Where Kristy came up with the rubbish she wrote, we don't know. What we do know is that it missed the mark...
Martz opens by telling her readers that,

"Every piece of lumber begins as a log. When logs arrive, they are sorted by specie [sic] and grade (a measure of the log's quality). Logs are then fed into a sawmill."

We had to chuckle at the notion that logs are sorted by "specie," given Martz's degree in accounting: "specie" is a term for coinage; trees are sorted by species. Snort.

Kristy had other choice information for her readers, including,

• "Logs go through the main saw. Several boards can be cut from a single log." – Duh, "several"? We'd hope so... and we'd also hope that Martz's source mentioned a gang saw for cutting multiple boards simultaneously, even if she didn't.
• "The lumber is transported down a conveyor belt and trimmed to specifications. The ends may be edged or trimmed if they are not straight." – Just "the ends," Kristy?

• "The finished lumber is given a grade for quality purposes and stacked. The packs of lumber are then entered into inventory and sold to customers." – We'd like to point out that lumber is dried before it's sold. We guess Kristy likes her boards warped...
• "The pieces of wood that do not qualify as lumber are waste. Most of the waste can be chipped and sold as a byproduct... These byproducts may be made into press board..." – That's not what pressboard is, Kristy, pressboard is made from layers of cardboard.

Martz clearly knew nothing about sawmills... probably nothing about lumber at all when she slammed this into her eHow submission box for an equally clueless content editor to "check." Guess who gets the Dumbass of the Day award, though?

¹ DMS, as in "You can't spell 'dumbass' without 'DMS'!" was the parent company of eHow.com, among other websites. It's now known as Leaf Group.
² The original has been deleted by Leaf Group, but can still be accessed using the Wayback machine at archive.org. Its URL was   ehow.com/how-does_4895616_a-sawmill-work.html

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