Portable sawmill for sale3/10/2023 ![]() Any level piece of ground with enough space to maneuver the logs can become a site for milling.Īs for the business itself, social media is a powerful tool to market your service, sell lumber and source logs. I have set up out in pastures, as well as driveways and front yards in town. It takes years of hard work to build up a business. While many sawyers generally welcome some free labor, don’t expect them to share their sources or customers with you. Most will be willing to show you the basics, and any three sawyers will have a half-dozen opinions on matters including cutting techniques and which brand of chainsaw is better. If you want to look into sawmilling, a good place to start is arranging a visit to a local sawyer. Specialty cutting, such as quarter-sawn sycamore, can bring higher prices than walnut, especially if your mill can cut wide slabs. Woodworkers, in turn, welcome unusual species for their projects. The key is being available to pick up the logs quickly, as tree services usually don’t get paid until the yard is cleaned up. They can be a source of a wide variety of species, including sycamore, cherry, walnut, sassafras, box elder, elm and hedge. Area tree services are an excellent source of logs at a minimal cost, because it saves them the effort of cutting them up and hauling them off to a landfill. Recently, I spent a full day helping a crane operator remove a huge tree from the roof of a house in a nearby town and got some beautiful oak lumber, as well as requests to help remove other downed trees from the storm.Ī portable sawmill can be a useful tool, even if you don’t have a source of timber on your own property. Anyone competent with a chainsaw is in high demand. Spring is always a busy time for me, because I live in tornado-prone Missouri. Building furniture from these trees lets them remain part of the family for generations. One of my favorite jobs is milling lumber “sentimental” trees from family property. As word got around that I had a sawmill, I started getting calls from neighbors for items including fencing and barn timbers. Over the past decade, the mill has provided me with lumber and a source of income. One of the most common requests for custom-cut lumber is a fireplace mantle, but a lot of my wood goes to woodworkers across the country for slab tabletops and other one-of-a-kind pieces of furniture. To replace the decking on my trailer, for example, I milled white oak logs into 16-foot by 13⁄4-inch-thick planks for a perfect fit. The 23-horsepower Briggs & Stratton engine on mine, for example, runs all day on 3 gallons or less of fuel, and processes a 20-inch diameter by 8-foot oak log into 2-by-4s in about half an hour.īeing able to mill lumber the exact size I need is a huge benefit. Manual mills typically use air-cooled gas engines in the 7 1⁄2- to 25-horsepower range. The blades cost about $25 each, last for about four hours of cutting oak and can be sharpened several times. The engine powers the band-saw blade, but muscle power does all the log handling.īand-saw blades take about a 1⁄8-inch kerf-less than half that of the old circle sawmill, which means they recover more lumber from each log and require less power to run. While hydraulic systems were available, I opted to save some money and purchased it as a manual sawmill. I needed lumber for a barn and several sheds, and I had a good supply of logs on my own property, so I purchased one. These mills are now available in various sizes and prices, ranging from a $3,000 no-frills “hobby mill” to $80,000 production machines with 60-horespower diesel engines and full hydraulics. A band-saw sawmill is an efficient, affordable and safe way to covert logs into lumber. Somehow, I managed to keep all body parts and some of my hearing intact while milling enough lumber to build the passive solar post-and-beam home where my wife and I raised our family (and still reside).įrom that experience, I got “sawdust in my veins,” and when portable band-saw sawmills became available, I took a serious look at buying one. Hardhats and hearing protection were unheard of. ![]() Besides the obvious hazard of working in the proximity of an unshielded 5-foot blade that occasionally threw fist-size chunks of wood in random directions, the mill had the nasty habit of throwing the belt (which also lacked safety shielding). ![]() My first experience with a sawmill was in the early 1980s, assisting on an old circular sawmill run by a flat belt which was driven by a tractor. The seasonal nature of farming means there are slack times as well as times of low income, and there are always construction projects that range in scope from replacing a few boards on the front porch to building a barn. For a source of lumber, as well as a profitable business, a portable sawmill can be a key piece of equipment on your farm.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply.AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |