WHAT WILL YOUR LOG RECOVER?
Enter both log-end diameters. Compare published sawmill performance against the Shoot-Out’s International ¼-inch log-scale baseline.
2003–2017Published event years
4Mill types compared
International ¼Shoot-Out log scale
Your log
Measure inside bark. Adjust each slider or type the number.
in
6 in60 in
in
6 in72 in
ft
6 ft20 ft
Illustrative accepted lumber
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Board feet from one log · published recovery factor applied to estimated International ¼ scale
Your log
International ¼ log scale—
Doyle scale · separate reference—
Scribner Decimal C · separate reference—
Roundwood volume · tapered frustum—
Historical records · always visible
Highest numeric BF/hour rates and recovery factors among the listed runs. These may come from different mills or years. “Quickest 100 BF” is calculated from the highest numeric BF/hour rate, not a separately timed contest. The 2005 chainsaw run has no precise hourly rate and cannot enter that ranking.
Shoot-Out “recovery” is accepted sawn BF ÷ International ¼ scaled BF. It is not the percentage of solid log volume converted to boards.
Behind the numbers
How we arrived at these estimates
The Great Portable Sawmill Shoot-Out brought different portable mills together to saw logs in front of a live audience. It was a rare chance to see how each machine and crew approached the same job: turn round logs into acceptable boards, then tally both the lumber and the time. The events made a compelling demonstration platform, even when participants disagreed about the fairest way to compare different designs.
The logs and the measure
The magazine’s accounts describe yellow-poplar logs in several editions. One 2017 report specifies 15- and 16-inch logs; the 2009 report describes four-log lots with different total scaled volumes. These were short demonstration runs, not a uniform, diameter-by-diameter trial across all years.
The organisers scaled logs with the International ¼-inch rule, allowing for defects where appropriate. Accepted sawn board feet divided by that log scale gave each mill’s recovery factor. A factor of 100% means the accepted lumber matched the log-rule estimate; it is not 100% of the log’s physical wood volume.
Four ways to make lumber
Chainsaw mills included the Logosol M7 and Woodworker’s Mill. Multi-blade circular mills included Mobile Dimension’s 12XLS. Swing-blade mills included Lucas and Peterson, including the smaller Peterson Skillmill. Bandsaw mills included Wood-Mizer, Baker, Timbery, Norwood and others.
They did not all produce boards the same way. Swing-blades cut edged dimensional boards directly from a stationary log. Bandsaws can cut thin slices efficiently, while an optional separate edger can trim the sides of boards without stopping the primary saw. That changes the equipment and workflow behind a BF/hour figure.
Why the results prompted debate
Board thickness mattered. The 2007 published rules accepted boards around one inch thick. Thin band kerfs are especially useful for 1-inch cutting. Swing-blade operators often wanted to show their strength producing thicker dimensional boards; a 2015 Peterson report says its team cut mostly 2-inch boards, and a Lucas report describes the same preference. The runs across years therefore cannot be treated as identical 1-inch or 2-inch tests. 2007 rules ↗ · 2015 swing-blade account ↗
Edgers mattered too. Bandsaw teams could use an additional edger in some editions. Wood-Mizer describes its 2013 LT70 working with a twin-blade edger, and Timbery says its 2017 edger helped raise production. Swing-blade teams could make fully edged boards on the one machine, so some operators considered a bandsaw-plus-edger rate a comparison of two machines against one. An edger is a valid production workflow; the calculator identifies confirmed edger use to help readers interpret the rate. Wood-Mizer’s 2013 account ↗ · Timbery’s 2017 account ↗
These were meaningful demonstrations of machinery and experienced sawyers, with different log lots, board mixes, helpers and sometimes extra equipment. Sawmill & Woodlot’s 2007 coverage said the event had evolved from a contest into a side-by-side showcase. The figures are useful benchmarks when their conditions are kept in view. Read the magazine account ↗
Our own experience
TurboSawmill at the Shoot-Out
Lucas and Peterson were the most prominent swing-blade competitors in the records we found. Their manually pushed machines achieved some exceptional short-run numbers. Jake recalls crews working together at either end of a machine, pushing and pulling at pace, and visibly exhausted when the run finished. That effort was part of the spectacle. TurboSawmill made a different choice: we entered automated mills to show their ease of use and a pace an operator could sustain throughout a working day.
2015 — our first entry. We brought a 10-inch automated Warrior. The reported production rate was 531 board feet per hour, with 32 board feet of miscuts. We chose to demonstrate an automated operating pace that could be sustained over a full day, instead of pushing for the highest possible short-run figure. The report described the accepted yield as slightly below the International ¼-inch log scale, but the exact recovery factor was not available in the sources checked for this page. Contemporary report ↗
2017 — our second entry. We brought the smaller 6-inch automated Warrior and chose to run it with one operator to demonstrate what a single person could do. The blade was damaged in freight, which affected the run; that explanation is our account of the event. We have not located a verified BF/hour or recovery figure for that entry, so it is listed below without a numerical value and is excluded from the averages. The 2017 edition is the last in the archived series used here. 2017 entrant line-up ↗
Year by year: mean of the documented runs
Each category cell below shows mean recovery / mean BF per hour for the recorded entrants of that type in that year. The TurboSawmill column names our individual entries so they remain visible alongside the group averages. The small n counts recovery records; the production average may use a different number of records. A dash means no entry for that category in this dataset.
| Year | Chainsaw | Multi-blade circular | Swing-blade | Bandsaw | TurboSawmill entry |
|---|
All eight archived event years from 2003 to 2017 appear above. Coverage is thin for some years and machine types. Read the individual linked runs below before treating a group average as representative of the full history.
Entrant audit: what the available records establish
The records table is a documented sample, not the full entrant list. For 2015 we can verify individual published profiles for Timbery M285, Lucas 10EFI and Peterson WPF, plus the contemporary account of TurboSawmill’s 10-inch Warrior. Peterson also reports entering a Junior Peterson, whose numeric result is not in this table. Other entrants may be absent. For 2017, a pre-event lineup posted by Peterson named Baker 3665D, Wood-Mizer Super LT70, Wood-Mizer LX450, EZ Boardwalk 40, Norwood LumberPro HD36, Lucas 8 EFI, Peterson WPF 10/35, EZ Boardwalk Jr., Norwood Frontier OS27, Lucas 6-18, Timbery M280, Turbo Warrior M6 and Wood-Mizer LT28. These are scheduled machines, not a verified list of completed runs: the same thread reports that the Junior Peterson did not arrive. The full official entrant and results sheets are needed to establish every actual 2015 and 2017 run. Missing entrants must not be silently counted as zero or represented by a group mean.
Across the documented years
Published Shoot-Out records
TurboSawmill · 2015 · 10-inch Warrior531 BF/hour · 32 BF miscuts · recovery: Unavailable
TurboSawmill · 2017 · 6-inch WarriorOne-operator entry · production: Unavailable · recovery: Unavailable
TurboSawmill entered in 2015 and 2017, not in every year of this historical series. Both entries appear in the table below. “Unavailable” means no numerical result could be verified from the accessible publications. The default group mean is the unweighted arithmetic average of listed recoveries for that sawmill type; each documented run counts once. Mean production uses only runs with a published BF/hour figure. These are means of the available documented runs, not all Shoot-Out entrants. A separate edger is flagged where confirmed; “unknown” does not mean none. Most reports do not list both end diameters for each log lot.
| Year | Sawmill | Type | Accepted BF/hr | Recovery vs International ¼ | Separate edger | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2015 | TurboSawmill 10-inch automated Warrior | Swing-blade | 531 (32 BF miscuts) | Unavailable | No | Report ↗ |
| 2017 | TurboSawmill 6-inch Warrior | Swing-blade | Unavailable | Unavailable | No | Entrant lineup ↗ |
Method: 2007 magazine report and scoring rules; 2009 official results; 2011 official results. University of Florida log-rule equations provide the three scale estimates. The 2007 and 2011 archive pages carry full results tables; the 2003 and 2005 scans and later individual profiles do not establish every entrant and metric across all years. These are the verifiable results found online for this calculator; they do not document every entrant. Figures not located in those publications are labelled Unavailable.
Calculation: The magazine scaled log lots using the International ¼-inch rule, sometimes adjusting for defects, and measured only accepted boards. Here, small-end diameter sets the unadjusted log scale, using a published 16-foot equation prorated to the entered length; large-end diameter affects only the tapered solid-wood volume. The selected Shoot-Out group mean or individual record is then multiplied by the International estimate. Doyle and Scribner are shown for comparison alone. The original runs used varying board widths and both 1-inch and 2-inch stock; no thickness-specific recovery or kerf correction can be inferred from the published summary data. Longer, wider, more tapered, different species, and defect-heavy logs may perform differently.
2015 SHOOTOUT
AUTOMATED M10 ENTRANT
Jake Peterson attended his first sawmill shootout in 2015, operating the Turbo Sawmill with Mike Moen off-bearing the timber. It was Jake’s first time operating the mill at a shootout, and nerves were high. He ran it at a reasonable, consistent pace—the kind of pace an operator could maintain throughout a working day.