I did a search for "sawmill" on this site and not much popped up. So let's start talking sawmills.
I've had the smallest mill Hud-son makes for somewhat over 10 years now. I love the thing. I call it my toy sawmill.
The other day I tried to do a search on YouTube to see if I could learn any new tricks. It seems there are quite a few cute blonds who do sawmilling. Not quite the information I was looking for, but entertaining non the less.
So no need to be some voluptuous blond to show us your mill, or what you do with it (but it's ok if you are too, we don't want to discriminate!)
I have a Wood-Mizer LX55 which is pretty small but will still handle a 26" diameter log up to 17.5' long so more than big enough to get me in trouble. I've got some pictures on this phone somewhere I'll post if I can find them.
I still use my Florida chainsaw mill, but drool at the dream of having a real mill. No place to put it and no cute blonde to run it. As it is, every time I bump into my Florida mill in the shop, I curse at it and threaten to turn it into an Alaskan mill.
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.
--Nathan, TX. Hire the lazy man. He may not do as much work but that's because he will find a better way.
That sounds like a fun class. My tree cutting degree came from the school of hard knocks. I won't mention the time my inexperience knocked power for a small Vermont town. Oops, I guess I did mention it. I worked in a circular mill when I was much much younger. Looking back I'm sure it seems like a lot more fun now than it actually was.
good question. It's probably not as long as I think. In reality probably about 60 seconds. Most of the time involves the slabbing, flipping by hand and dealing with the lumber.
Right now my mill will only cut 10'. I'm got some track coming that will get me to 14'. I won't be able to cut 16' unless I can get some more track, and my base is pt 4x6x16 I'd need to do something different there as well. I also don't have any locust I know of. Whatcha building, a bridge?
Funny you should say that. I have a pile of 3"×8"×8' of it that was from a bridge. I want to use that stuff up on a gazebo, and 16' I can eliminate columns in the center.
That's some good looking ash. I had more than i knew what to do with on OH, not so much down here. I did get a few cheery and good sized walnut from my parents place in the woods before they moved. I wish I had longer as there were four more walnut with my name on the and almost 2 dozen tulip popular that were all huge, a dozen or so monster white oak could have been culled too.
