Sawmills

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Tom Dunn

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Tom Dunn
If one considers stationary sawmills, how common are circular saw mills as opposed to band saw operations?

Are new circular saw sawmills being commonly built?
 

scsmith42

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Scott Smith
Tom, from what I've heard for many years the industry has been converting from circular based to stationary band mills due to the reduced blade kerf / higher lumber recovery that is achieved with a bandmill.

Circular mills are common where they have been established for many years, or have older owner / operators. Bandmills are the coming thing, and there are many multiple-head bandmills in operation in production environments.

Scott
 

Bernhard

Bernhard
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Ditto what Scott said. When I was looking into buying a sawmill (thankfully I came to my senses ,though), I only found 5 manufactures for smaller circular milles (Peterson, Lucas, Meadows, and the other 2 I cant remember).
There are quite a lot of small old circ mills around. I never considered those, because they are IMHO exceedingly dangerous, need a lot of power, take up too much space, etc.
Main problem I found with those older mills is safety, large engine requirement, need at least 2 people to operate, quality of cut is marginal at best. It is pretty difficult to make and keep a 48" dia blade flat and running true.
My neighbor has one, it is an old Frick running of a 170hp cummings with flat belts. When cutting, the operator stands right behind a 48" sawblade...one slip and you are history. Also, he has hit a an embedded rock/nail, etc on occasion: The insert teeth of the blade fly off in all direction like shrapnell. The tin roof over the operator stand has small holes in it!
If you hit anything with a bandsaw, it may damage the band , but wouldn't hurt the operator.
Anyway, just my two cents
Bernhard
 
J

jeff...

bellying up to the bar here to re-enforce what has already been said. I actually got the opportunity to operate one of the small circ mills like Bernard is talking about, everything he said is true - including the holes in the roof. I cut one log and decided this machine spells danger with a capital D. But it was fun to learn how to use the saw.

I have yet to see a portable band mill that I would consider a production mill. They are custom lumber making machines really intended to custom saw lumber, like QS'ing and various thicknesses. In all honesty I actually feel safer operating my WM than I do running my table saw. As Bernard stated when you hit log trash you usually just damage a band. Although a few weeks ago, one of the portable band mills out at the log yard hit a piece of metal pipe in a yard tree walnut log and it actually broke the drive shaft. The band must have hit the pipe just right to do that, but still no operator damage, only mill damage.

If I were going for a production mill I would seriously look at a stationary multi head band mill, convayrer system and an edger. Imagine if you would being able to feed a log into a muli-headed mill, off comes 5 or 6 boards carried away to an edger, edged and stacked. The remaining log is returned, flipped and ran through the multi-head band mill to produce another 5 or 6 boards. the remainder of the log is ran back trough and made into more boards. That my friend would be a production setup. Not a portable band mill that requires a min of 3 cuts per board.

Thanks
 
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