Who we are
We are a company of two developers, not a studio with departments. The two of us do everything ourselves: design, code, the calculation engine, the texts and the support email. We are Nadya Yashchuk and Ivan Lukichev.
Nadya is a software developer and the publisher. Sawmill Planner and its apps are officially published by her sole proprietorship registered in Austria; the formal details are in the Impressum.
Ivan builds the product side: the calculation engine, the cutting optimizer, this site and the articles. Before writing software he worked at sawmills for eight years (see below), so the calculators are built around the questions a sawyer asks on a shift: how many board feet, what will the buyer scale, where do I set the blade. More of his work is at lukichev.biz and on LinkedIn.
Because it is just the two of us, everything stays personal: we decide what to build, answer our own email and shape each release around what sawyers actually ask for.
From the mill floor — a note from Ivan
I started working at sawmills at 18 and stayed until I was about 26 — that was the 2000s. I worked on band sawmills and on circular sawmills, including a Finnish Laimet. On the band mills I was both the head sawyer and the second man on the mill, the offbearer. I also worked as a saw filer, sharpening band saw blades.
So I know from my own shifts what it takes to work out the volume of logs and lumber, to keep the tally, and to decide which boards, and how many of them, to saw out of a log for the best result. That is exactly what these calculators and the Sawmill Planner app do. It took me many years to get here, but the app I wished I had back then has finally been born.
— Ivan Lukichev
What we make
- The board foot calculator — board feet of a board, a stack or an order, with price.
- The log scale calculator — Doyle, Scribner and International ¼ side by side.
- The log cutting calculator — a cutting pattern for a log, with the blade height for every cut.
- The Sawmill Planner app for iPhone, iPad and Android, for the mill floor. It is in development.
How the calculators work
The site and the app share one calculation engine. Board feet use the standard definition: 1 board foot is 144 cubic inches. The log rules are computed from their formulas: Doyle and International ¼ exactly, Scribner by the formula that follows the original diagram rule within a few percent. The cutting optimizer models a round log by its small-end diameter and searches every face of the log exactly, on a 0.1 mm grid, for the boards and timbers you choose.
What we are honest about
The results are estimates. A real log is not a perfect cylinder, scalers round their measurements, and a contract may name an official table instead of a formula. Check the numbers before you buy or sell logs and lumber. The terms of use say the same in legal words.
Privacy
The calculators run in your browser; the sizes you type are not sent anywhere. We count visits with Google Analytics, and in the EEA, the UK and Switzerland only after you agree. Details are in the privacy policy.
Say hello
Questions, corrections, a size or a log rule you are missing: write to contact@nadzeyayashchuk.com. We read everything.