re: Sawmills

 I've wanted a sawmill ever since I took the logging and milling  course during the forestry field station in college.  They actually had an ancient saw mill but they stopped using it a couple of years earlier, probably because of insurance and liability issues.  It was an old style saw with about a 4' round blade that moved the log past the saw.  We tried to talk our instructor into seeing if we could get the diesel engine to start but he would not go for it.  Instead we visited several different kind of mills.  Pretty cool but not nearly as cool as actually running that old mill would have been.  

The logging section of that class was pretty fun.  Learning to drop a tree exactly where you want it was was cool.  Seeing a 100' off balance tree twist so that would fall between 2 other trees we were not going to cut so that it would not hang on those trees  was probably the coolest thing we learned.