Newbie from NWO

[morgoon]

Hello from Northwestern Ontario Canada

My mill was built by my dear friend and mentor, Unto who built this mill in 2000

It had not run for several years, but the mill head was stored indoors

specs:

2"x6" by 24' rails with 3/4" wide guide strip down the length

4 post design with 15hp wisconsin, and a belt drive with a homemade idler pulley to engage and disengage the blade

Built to the 13'2" blade length, riding on dodge caravan hubs, and temp spare tires

One tire has been flipped to bolt the 15" drive pulley to it...

I have to design a lubrication system, and finish the guards

I removed the trailer fender guards that were there previously and built thie guard you see from some store racking that I came across

I have 3 refrigerator doors that are going to donate their flat metal to close the guard in

The exhaust needs to be permanently fixed in a working fashion as to have it raise with the saw head

The muffler is from a vw rabbit diesel...straight out of the scrap pile

It is not too loud, but I would like it a touch quieter...

all in good time

I think I will like it here

Regards

Morgoon

[animatedpomegranate]

Nice saw, well done

[morgoon]

Thanks

My wife is killing herself laughing at my wonderful spelling of newbie...

Ahhhhh to be a "nebie"

Nice....

I hope I saw better than I spell

[r.man]

Hello Morgoon and welcome to the forum. Nice looking saw but not enough pictures. I would be interested in knowing how your hubs are mounted. As to a source of metal to close in the guards I have had good luck using old household 200 gal furnace oil tanks. You MUST be sure that the tank had only furnace oil or diesel in it but other than that they cut up fairly easily and they provide you with a lot of flat weldable metal. So far I have built 4 sap stoves and a pump reel from tanks. They can be cut with a fine tooth jig saw and are a very economical source of metal. (FREE) Good luck with your reno, sawing, spelling and wife.

[morgoon]

That is a good source of flat metal..what is a sap stove...and is a pump reel...just what it sounds like..

Pm me some pics if you have them...or post em here whatever is acceptable is fine with me

I will fire up some pics tomorrow morning I will go out to the saw and take a wheel off for close ups

Mostly it is engineered by my dear friend Unto who is about 85, and a close friend of his, they sure know how to keep things simple

I did a lot of work to straighten out the carriage wheels, as the carriage tried to escape the mill when I towed it from its resting spot in the field. This mill fell into disuse, and languished as a rental saw for a while, then it just got left to sit for several years.

I took an intrest in it and as towed it out of the field I hit a plow furrow long forgotten in waist deep grass. The carriage tipped hard to one side, almost flopping over and smashed back HARD onto the mill track, lifting up the other side briefly.....so things got really tweaked

It was just a short jaunt to the shop I should have bolted the carriage down, I lived and learned on that one...the whole incident was over as quick as it started, I was kicking myself for such a silly mistake

This mill is a sister mill to an electric...they are identical, but built by these two friends, so they have differences, depending on who had what in their scrap pile etc...

It is cool to see them both in action...it is like two buddies, each building an identical hot rod ....one chooses a big 4 barrell carb, the other chooses a six pack... etc

I haven't got the whole rig dead level but it cuts very straight I set the carriage to within 2mm of true on one side...the other is bang on. (a testament to the builders) It rolls on what I was told were wheels from a forklift. The mill bed is way over built, so no damage there but the carriage wheels were just hung on with a slice of angle iron, so they bent all to heck in the field "testing"

It really belongs to me because it was such a marvel of homebrewed thinking, and I did not want to let this "heirloom" (to me anyway) be sold to someone who it might not mean as much too.

Then I milled some lumber, and now I am hopelessly hooked!

The band wheels are temporary spares from an eighties or so dodge minivan, and the hubs are for the rear axle, they bolt onto a flange, so the mill has two 1/2'" thick hinged plates that the hubs bolt to. That have adusters on them to control where the blade tracks on the wheel (toe in or toe out)

Final tracking is pretty much letting the blade ride where the crown of the tire is , and then there are two idler wheels to set the final "trueness" of the blade at the throat.

Pics will explain it all

Still lot of kinks to work out, like balancing the tires and making a lubrication system

Right now on another forum I am working on building a PWM pulse wave modulator to control a dc winch I hope to use as a feed control

I don't know toooo much about electronics, but it is fun, and it just so happens that Unto the builder is a former bush mechanic, and an electrical engineer by trade

So we get to talk ..er I try to learn in a univeral langugae

it is a great way to spend time to someone who has so much knowlege to pass along

Thanks for the warm welcome guys

[r.man]

Morgoon, a sap stove is a stove to hold and fire a sap pan for making maple syrup. A pump reel, thats what I call it, is just a large steel reel to hold the pipe of a submersible drilled well pump. In my area there are a lot of 6 inch drilled water wells that are generally 100 ft deep or deeper. To work on the pump or wiring the whole works have to be raised. This reel allows the pipe to be rolled up so it doesn't have to touch the ground. The other advantage is that I can lift a 100 ft line without breaking a sweat and without a helper. I have never taken pictures of either of these but I could if you are not just being polite in asking. I still have a problem manipulating and posting pictures but I should have another go at it soon. I look forward to seeing your new pictures.

[morgoon]

Sap stove....OH sure I know what that is.. I made maple syrup for a while when I was a teenager at a conservation area I worked at.


Huge windstorms here today, almost tornado force winds

Probably lost about 30 trees on our property

Some big Poplar...16-20" diameter

Still no log arch built yet, but tomorrow I have to find a way to move 2 16' that went down across the neighbours drive

I hope to keep the logs that long, but we will see how they move, gonna try and slide a trailer axle under them at mid point and roll them home behind the truck

Lots of work for the saw...

Having trouble posting pics

Will try again tomorrow...

[morgoon]

this is a photo of the right side of the mill, the sparkplug in the lower part of the frame is welded to the toe in/toe out adjustment At the very top is the band tensioner, it is really simple,,,the entire hub/hinge assembley rides on an inner horizontal hinge, that pivots the wheel down and up in a arc. On the left is the handle you pull down to set tension (control the arc), and the right is a bolt that sits in a welded nut on the arm of the saw and by turning it up or down you can fine tune the arc of the horizontal hinge setting the tension precisely... I am sure that is clear as mud







The drive side of the mill is just a toe in and out hinge, a hub same as the opposite side

[Falcon]

looks great. with that muffler i bet its quiet.
Falcon