These plans are to build a heavy duty sawmill. The saw is a fresh design based on a simple idea that the saw must be extremely strong, very accurate, easy to align and maintain, and cost efficient to build. It was built to cut Mesquite, a very hard wood, so it will make short order of any kind of wood you want to saw. Basically, it utilizes a very simple frame and track. It has all of the little things that make it a great saw. A sawmill works best when everything is heavy duty and oversize and you use a sharp blade. This sawmill has the qualities of the best available sawmills without the stuff most people do not need. The frame is made from 3” x 3” x 3/16” tubing with a lot of 1/4 ” plate structural supports, so whether you saw with 9HP or 30HP, it will be stable when the blade is 28” above the track and you are cutting at full power. The saw blade is raised with a $100 utility winch twisting 1 1/4 ” diameter acme thread rods, so you raise or lower by pressing a rocker switch which comes with the winch. The acme rods greatly improve saw cutting accuracy. Unlike cable lift systems, your blade will not float around when wood density changes and thus it will make boards easy to plane. You source the acme rods directly from a very reasonable USA manufacturer and the implementation is a relatively simple effort to build. The saw cuts easily with as little as the use of one hand because it rides on 3” dual ball bearing wheels which you can build or buy readily and reasonably from gate suppliers. The drawings show a new blade guide design using a 2” roller and a ball bearing. The guides are easily adjusted up/down, in/out, and tilt. Because they are so rugged, they will keep 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 as little as $2,600 using all new components. The cost is based on using the suggested component suppliers. If you follow the provided suggestions, you will likely be able to reduce that cost a lot. A little creative recycle effort will dramatically reduce your cost. Much of the cost is steel and the engine and it's clutch. As with pressing a switch to raise/lower your blade, you will find that having a centrifugal clutch is a great feature to have. The sawmill is relatively simple to build if you can cut and weld steel and drill holes with a drill press. The demonstration sawmill was built with imbedded bearings, custom shafts, etc. The design has since been gone through and every possible way of simplifying the build of the demonstrated design, and avoiding the machine shop, has been addressed. Flange plates replace the imbedded bearings, keyed shafts replace the custom shafts, etc.. The blade covers lift off and the saw blade is loosened and tightened with a socket ratchet wrench, so blade maintenance is a 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 designed around 19” pulleys and has a 30” square log capacity with a 20’ track. A design form is provided so that you can shrink or enlarge the plans so that the sawmill best meets your needs. The suggested source of the pulleys offers them at a fraction of the prices you commonly see advertised, and they are the pulleys used in the demonstration sawmill. The list of sources for the off 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. Written documentation, drawings, 3D views, pictures and video total 588 MB of data so there is a lot of information to help you with every detail. They consist of step by step written dialogue, 60+ measured drawings (parts and assemblies), and 3D PDFs of each part and many partial assemblies. Using the 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. There are also a lot of pictures. So whether you need a lot of hand holding or if 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, because the sawmill is far simpler to build than it looks. Every part not found in your local hardware store is drawn and viewable in 3D so that understanding what it does and how it works should quickly become understood. There are three videos on YouTube of the demonstration sawmill and one of the original sawmill. One describes the assembly of the demonstration saw after it was disassembled for painting, 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 video shows cutting a large very hard hardwood. Aside from the higher end commercial sawmills, very few sawmill videos will show how their saw works when it really gets challenged. I built the demonstration sawmill after I discovered what happens when you do not make your saw structure heavy duty enough. If you are going to cut serious wood, you should know what your sawmill is capable of. Blades are expensive and dull very quickly. A dull blade is dangerous and produces poor quality lumber. A blade sharpener plan is included which will pay for itself in less than 6 blade sharpenings. It is consistently accurate to within a few thousands of an inch. It is also easy to build from your shop scrap metal. If you build this sawmill, you will have a lot of new friends, and if you do a great build, you will get your cost back plus a lot more in short order should you no longer need the sawmill.
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