W.L. West & Sons Ltd.
Timber Talks - February 2010

Trading

The past two months have been very difficult. Trade is down for all of us. Like most in our trade, stocks have been falling and the supply chain has geared down a few cogs. There is less timber available, and on a forward basis, just to add insult to injury, the prices are up. Shortages & more shortages the agents are telling us.

We saw a recovery in Sterling but all the gains have been just about wiped in the last few days, making imports more expensive as well as replacement unit costs increasing. A double blow. Do beware of quoting too far forward.
The dollar fell to a 10 year low of £1/$1.50 and the euro has dropped back to approx £1/Euro 1:09

Some merchants have been selling their red hardwoods in particular at well below replacement cost. This means that by the time the cash is collected the purchasing ability will be less. In a recession this is a stupid move. It unbalances the market, customers will automatically think that prices are tumbling and quote for forward work, but the actual cost will be higher when they come to buy. This rash decision has a problematic fallout in the trade, creating more unilateral damage for all. It is totally stupid. One of our softwood agents reports the same tales of woe in his sector, as a result this short term gratification will do much harm to an already fragile trade.
Debt collection has also become much harder at this time as well. Please; it is for all our benefits to keep the flow of cash moving. It is in everyones interest, the trade has just moved a step nearer to reducing credit limits because the insurers have slashed cover, debt collection agencies have had a boom in trade for obvious reasons. Perhaps the 0.3% growth in the economy has come from the debt collection agency sector alone!
One of our other Merchant friends said; ‘“Even the people who don’t pay don’t want anything”!

News

In the Timber Trades Journal this week there was an interesting article. A proposal by Solihull’s MP Lorely Burt who has researched the benefits of cutting VAT to 5% geared directly to the construction sector. The benefits are huge and would cost the Government approx £102million P/A, approx 25% of the cost of the car scrappage scheme.

The main point of the proposal is the potential creation of over 55,000 jobs in the 1st year freeing up £450 million to go directly on renovation work on social housing, 19,000 houses being brought back into use each year plus improvements to over 174,000 private homes.

His team have estimated that the cut would contribute more than £1.4bn to the UK in 2010 alone rising to £17bn by 2019. At the end of the decade an extra 81,500 jobs would be created. With this amount of jobs perhaps they could fill in the potholes left after 10 days of snow !!!!

____________________________________

We are keen to machine timber in a fast track way, we can turn orders round quickly, and of course we are very keen to price any hardwood or U/S redwood enquires you may have.

Fresh sawn constructional Oak is working well with a turn round time approx 7 working days, this beats the imported times from France and other parts of Europe. We have seen some real problems which have occurred recently where beams brought in after waiting 2/3 weeks for the order to materialise only to find rejection problems, the rejection replacements then have taken another 2 weeks to come in. In one instance it has stalled a job. The slight benefit on price was eroded by the timber not being fit for purpose.

All our fresh sawn Oak is inspected and we do work within BS5756 to ensure wherever possible beams needed for a job are right 1st time.
Over the last three months we have milled some good T/T Euro Oak logs which are now starting their air drying process. With the last lot of Sycamore logs now in the yard they too will be converted very shortly into T/T. Once converted they are dried immediately with the benefits of our Cigomak vacuum kilns. The resulting effect is second to none in the trade!
Our Yew stocks are being converted into T/T plank as well. This rare species will now be available in the Summer/Autumn of 2010.
Please note we will be stock taking on Thursday 1st and Tuesday 6th April 2010.

It's a funny old trade

We have had some strange comments in the trade this month. First we had a debate over the moisture content of Green or Fresh Sawn Oak. The text books will tell you that 86% moisture content would not be unknown in Green Oak, although we had a complaint that our Green Oak was too wet!  If your application or process does not allow for this level of moisture, please think about asking for ‘Air drying’ timber. We try to Air Dry down to 26%±, to enable us to kiln dry the timber. Kilning then takes it down to 16%± 2%, although this can be varied dependent on the timber’s end use. We only kiln dry up to 80mm thickness. Over this thickness it will be Air Drying stock.

We then had one of our customers call to confirm what he already knew — that timber generally can only shrink by 1% over its length. Although this customer was being accused by his client that the timber he provided as joists had shrunk by over10% !!!!!
There is a lot of knowledge in our trade, but sometimes it is not in the right place at the right time ! Enough said.

_________________________________________

Can we remind you about this year’s WESTS WOOD SHOW on the 7 & 8 May. If there are any of you who would like to exibit or show your woodworking skills, please call Jo West here at Selham and she will discuss it with you. Or email her on jowest@wlwest.co.uk

Thank you for your business and loyalty, we all need to work together to protect this fragile trade we are in.

W.L. WEST & SONS LTD
Selham, Petworth, West Sussex GU28 0PJ
United Kingdom

Tel: 01798 861611   
Fax: 01798 861633   
E-mail: sales@wlwest.co.uk

Email W.L. West