: There are a couple yards that actually scarf plywood for you, I know of one
: guy that has a shop very near one of these yards and bought 4'x50' sheets
: of ply (for a boat nearly that long).

There is a picture of this operation in Chris Kulczycki's books "The kayak Shop" and the same pic in "The New Kayak Shop"

: How exactly you pick up a 50 foot
: long piece of plywood no one ever told me

Actually I've been looking into this issue for a while.

It is a real pain. One reason they won't go over 50 feet is shipping and handling problems. A flatbed trailer is typically 48 feet long, while a semi van trailer (the most common closed box semi-trailer you see being dragged around the highways) is 53 feet long, and 8 to 8 1/2 feet wide. That gives you just enough room for two people to grab the leading edge of the plywood and drag it into the trailer, without it landing on their toes. A gentle push on the trailing edge from a forklift will assist. If the plywood is stacked on a long skid it can be simply shoved into the truck. But that long skid is going to be a lot of work to make. If you are dealing with 3/4 inch plywood (about 75 pounds for a 4x8 sheet) each sheet of 4x50 will be about 300 pounds, so you'll get maybe 4 to 6 sheets (1200 to 1800 pounds) on a skid. Much more than that and it will be very hard to move. If you were to put wheels on it you could get one skid into the truck, but you couldn't get a second one on top of it without special equipment (like a very long, adjustable height ramp)

After something like that is loaded into a truck you won't be able to use a forklift to load other materials on top of it.

If you use a flatbed you'll have two feet hanging over the tail end of a 48 foot trailer. This is perhaps illegal. Depending on the trailer design your overall vehicle length might still be under the state maximum, but you might get stopped by DOT inspectors or state police for having a load overhang the bumper. To be on the safe side you'd need a special permit for oversized loads from each state you travel through. Easy to obtain, but a few dollars more. Since the flatbed is open on top, a crane can load two stacks of 75 sheets (3/4 inch) for a load of about 45,000 pounds. With a tarp over it that should meet height and weight requirements.

With thinner plywood you would get more sheets, but it would stack about as high and you'd still have the bumper overhang issue.

PGJ