A family-owned sawmill near the Blue Ridge Parkway in Huddleston, Virginia.
Follow along as we show you our day-to-day operations, along with any number of situations we get ourselves into. We are a husband and wife team who want to help others see how important sawmills are to America (and the world). You can watch as we show the good, the bad, and the ugly of owning your own business.
There is a big analogue scale on the top of the carriage. It's old school and they work fairly well but digital networks certainly make it easier, quicker and more accurate but not so easy to modify a hydraulic system. Good to see it making good speed though as so many mills on RU-vid are creeping along.
There are 3 sides to modern sawmilling. Those that don't change for the better. Those that embrace improvement. And in too many cases ones that are actually going backwards. The 2 biggest costs in sawmilling are raw material and labour. Wasting either time or having poor recovery is crazy.
Hey, as long as the person cutting the wood know what is needed from the wood and he is comfortable with the equipment then he is going to do what is needed. So if you are going to try to talk the talk, you better be able to show that you can walk the walk.
How many fbm in 8 hrs foes your mill cut. ??? What is the daily record cut number??? Im guessing 15-20,000? You do gave a double arbor edger for cant sawing?? Or you use a resaw and single edger.
17000 bdft on circle mill a long time ago. 10 to 12 average. Just a bd edger. We resaw on 2 horizontal bandmills sometimes. That can add production and save saw kerf.
If you are interested there must be many vertical bandsaws available up here in Canada!! As many milks gave closed down !! You can mount it and get it ready to just do a quick weekend change out! Then you can handle those karger logs with ease!! Tok much tine shaving them down and you lose alot of lumber with the angled side cuts from the shaving. Have to edge that off! You want me to find you one that can handle 48”?? Crap one of our resaws could almost do that!!
Good to see your mill making good pace but you should consider if a band saw headrig will serve you better. If the saw logs are cheap it may not balance out the benefits but always keep an eye on the figures. I don't mean a horizontal and heaven forbid anything under a 10 inch blade. The blue stain thing is dependent on the customer. Some really like it but many professionals can not risk using it. Simple if their customer complains after an item is made they are screwed. Best solution for that situation is that the end user selects the pieces for the craftsman to use.
At outr big mill we had two headrigs with 12” wide x20’ bandsaws!! Cut 8’ dia cedars,spruce,fir up here in Bc Canada.80,000 fbm each mill per shift !!Fir side/pine side! I pulled lumber on the greenchain for two yrs!! Then became maintenance helper then challenged the welding tickets. . Rest is history!! Welded everything from boilers,sawmills,refineries, co gen boilers , tanks of all sizes.
When you break a log down and then split it into two cants and send it down the line what happens with the cants? Are they moved to one of the band mills to finish sawing?
Check out helmsberg sawmill. They have stacked circular headrig with an adjustable edger all on the head rig!!!! . It is so productive these mounts can be slowly fabbed up and installed
You don’t know what you’re talking about there’s more waste with a vertical edger. I run one everyday for years and it’s better to have a guy running a edger so he can have more than 2 seconds to think about how he’s going to edge the board. If you watch helmsburg sawmill he could be leaving way more wane on every single board. Can have up to half the length wane and not change the grade. He loses footage with every cut and I do the same thing everyday too. With our head rig
@@shanehumphrey4827 that’s great production is up but not if your throwing away 2 or 3 bucks off every board I bet if you ask both mills how many logs and the board footage every day for a 8 hour shift. They are very probably very close
We had a Nhla grader come for a week And that’s the first thing he improved for us was the lumber was being over edged by a crazy amount fas or select can have up to half the length of the board with bark on it so if your making totally clean boards every time your chipping wood that should stay on that board just watch his videos I’m not saying helmsburg does a bad job. He just could be making his mill more money
You guys need a top saw and adjustable edger on headrig!! One other mill has those and what a production difference. I think it would double your output!!
That was one very unhappy and cantankerous log. It just didn't want to go where you wanted it to. But, it did give you some nice wood. Maybe one day you can introduce your crew. Also it was nice to see the whole process from log to finished lumber.
I grew up around a sawmill cutting dense grain short leaf SYP, good stuff! Not much left, mostly plantation grown loblolly with 1/4"-1/2" growth rings.Thanks for the video.
Hello from St. George, New Brunswick, Canada, I love these sawing videos, it reminds me of my childhood, im 60 now, I juse to help a neighbour with a old frik he had.those were the days.
You know, if you had some old screens laying around you could use them to shade some of the glare from the back side of the saw cab and maybe cut down on some of the heat build up in the cab. Otherwise that was a nice bit of saw work on that log which gave you some nice boards.
Great job on this video! The process of sawing cherry logs was explained so well, and I found it very informative. Your careful approach and thorough explanations taught me a lot about the value of precision in woodworking
