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Sawmill Plans to build a heavy duty band sawmill to cut wood for lumber
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Sawmill Plans to build a heavy duty band sawmill to cut wood for lumber
Price: US $35.00

These plans are to builda heavy duty sawmill. The saw is a fresh design based on a simple ideathat the saw must be extremely strong, very accurate, easy to align andmaintain, and cost efficient to build. It was built to cut Mesquite, avery hard wood, so it will make short order of any kind of wood you want tosaw. Basically, it utilizes a very simple frame and track. It hasall of the little things that make it a great saw. A sawmill works bestwhen everything is heavy duty and oversize and you use a sharp blade.This sawmill has the qualities of the best available sawmills without thestuff most people do not need. The frame is made from 3” x 3” x 3/16”tubing with a lot of ¼” plate structural supports, so whether you saw with 9HPor 30HP, it will be stable when the blade is 28” above the track and you arecutting at full power.

The saw blade is raisedwith a $100 utility winch twisting 1¼” diameter acme thread rods, so you raiseor lower by pressing a rocker switch which comes with the winch. The acmerods greatly improve saw cutting accuracy. Unlike cable lift systems,your blade will not float around when wood density changes due to such things as limbs, which are also inside the log, and thus your boards will be easy to plane. You can source the acme rods directly on and the implementation is a relatively simpleeffort to build. The saw cuts easily with as little as the use of onehand because it rides on 3” dual ball bearing wheels which you can build or buyreadily and reasonably from gate suppliers. The drawings show a new bladeguide design using a 2” roller and a ball bearing. The guides are easilyadjusted up/down, in/out, and tilt. Because they are so rugged, they willkeep their alignment. The design greatly reduces blade stress and heat.

Cost is a big issue and you should be able to saw your first log for aslittle as $3,000 using all new components. The cost is based on usingthe suggested component suppliers. If you follow the providedsuggestions, you will likely be able to reduce that cost a lot. Alittle creative recycle effort will dramatically reduce your cost.Much of the cost is steel and the engine and it\'s snowmobile clutch. Aswith pressing a switch to raise/lower your blade, you will find that having acentrifugal clutch is a great feature to have.

The sawmill isrelatively simple to build if you can cut and weld steel and drill holes with a drill press. The demonstration sawmill was built withembedded bearings, custom shafts, etc. The design has since been gonethrough and every possible way of simplifying the build of the demonstrateddesign, and avoiding the machine shop, has been addressed. Flange platesreplace the embedded bearings, keyed shafts replace the custom shafts, etc..

The blade covers liftoff and the saw blade is loosened and tightened with a socket ratchet wrench, so blade maintenance isa snap. Although you can build metal blade covers, wood covers are drawn and recommended so that you likely will be able to save your blade in the event of a mishap.

The sawmill is designedaround 19” pulleys and has a 30” square log capacity with a 20’ track. Adesign form is provided so that you can shrink or enlarge the plans so that thesawmill best meets your needs. The suggested source of the pulleys offersthem at a fraction of the prices you commonly see advertised, including , and they are thepulleys used in the demonstration sawmill. The list of sources for theoff the shelf components are well worth the cost of the plans alone.

The plans are on a CD and are designed to be read by Adobe Reader on your computer. No paper plans are provided. Written documentation, drawings, 3D views, and pictures total 588 MB of data so there is a lot of information to help you with every detail. Theyconsist of step by step written dialogue, 60+ measured drawings (parts andassemblies), and 3D PDFs of each part and many partial assemblies. Usingthe 3D PDFs, you can rotate and view every part from every angle. The drawing and 3D files were created using the same software used to create input for 3D printers, so the detail is very good. Thereare also a lot of pictures. So whether you need a lot of hand holding orif you see it you can build it, the plans are designed to meet your needs.You will likely find that you only need a few of the drawings, becausethe sawmill is far simpler to build than it looks. Every part not foundin your local hardware store is drawn and viewable in 3D so that understandingwhat it does and how it works should quickly become understood.

There are three videos onYouTube of the demonstration sawmill and one of the original sawmill. Onedescribes the assembly of the demonstration saw after it was disassembled forpainting, one details the blade guides, and the other one shows the saw cutting Mesquite. Search\"TexasBen5\" on YouTube to view the videos. Note that the videoshows cutting a large very hard hardwood. Aside from the higher endcommercial sawmills, very few sawmill videos will show how their saw works whenit really gets challenged. If you look closely, they usually show their sawmills cutting a soft wood such as white pine or demo with western red cedar. I built the demonstration sawmill after I discoveredwhat happens when you do not make your saw structure heavy duty enough. If youare going to cut serious wood, you should know what your sawmill is capable of. Weak sawmills cut lumber which varies in thickness when the wood density changes and the result is boards which are difficult to plane.

Blades are expensive anddull very quickly. A dull blade is dangerous and produces poor qualitylumber. A blade sharpener plan is included which will pay for itself inless than 6 blade sharpenings. It is consistently accurate to within afew thousands of an inch. It is also easy to build from your shop scrapmetal.

If you build thissawmill, you will have a lot of new friends, and if you do a great build, youwill get your cost back plus a lot more in short order should you no longerneed the sawmill.

This completed sawmill will easily out perform the commercial sawmills under $15k because the commercial guys have labor, equipment, building, advertising, etc. costs in addition to profit, all of which result in most of the cost of the sawmill and they have to use light materials so that you can afford to have the sawmill shipped to you. If you are going to build your own sawmill, I highly recommend the small extra amount you will spend to make your sawmill heavy duty and not a cheap clone of what the commercial guys sell. I strongly emphasis this because I built what I thought would be a real strong sawmill after a lot of personal research and was disappointed with the result. That was my first sawmill, and although I was not completely satisfied with it, it did work pretty good. The saw frame and the use of cables were the weak features. If you look closely at the video of my first sawmill, you can see the problems. As a result, I redesigned the sawmill and built my second sawmill, which is the one the plans show. Myself and others have cut a lot of lumber with this second sawmill and it gets the job done with all types of wood.




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