My Sawmill

There is something appealing about being able to slice trees into lumber. Maybe it's just operating the machinery that does the job. I don't know, but I thought it would be cool to have my own sawmill. I thought this before we ever moved to Kentucky in 2003. I had looked at the ads and thought about the different options. Of course, when you seek to limit the amount of financial outlay as much as possible, you can only dream big.

While doing some searching online, I came across Procut Mobile Sawmills. The Procut is a chainsaw powered mill that you build yourself. The information about it on the website and what reviews I could find made it sound like a nice unit. Perhaps, what I liked the best about the description were the estimates about how much it would cost to build. I didn't have any welding experience, but I figured I could learn enough to be able to build a Procut.

So, in the summer of 2003, I ordered plans for the mill. I studied them, and they seemed pretty straight forward and clear. I bought a used arc welder and some welding supplies. Then, I bought the steel I needed from Sandusky Sales in Columbia, Kentucky. I began building the mill in August of 2003, after putting a concrete floor in the garage (a 24' x 40' area). I cut all of the steel using an aluminum oxide metal cutting blade on my circular saw. My welding wasn't perfect, but I figured out how to make it work.

I don't remember how many hours I spent working on the mill, but we tried it out for the first time in October of 2003. I had a small cherry log and a cedar log. It was a pretty neat experience to mill a couple of boards for the first time. I hadn't painted the mill yet and still had it in the garage. Talk about dust! I don't recomend milling inside a closed space like that.

The picture to the right is of the mill taken when I was milling some beech logs during late fall 2004. After I finished building the mill, I painted it with some blue automotive paint that had been left in my garage by the previous owner (he left a lot of things, most of it hauled off as junk). I painted the saw carriage gray, also with auto paint that was in the garage.

I bought a new Husqvarna 3120xp to be the mill's powerhead. It has a 36" bar for use on the mill and a 24" bar for using off of the mill. It takes about 5 minutes to remove the saw from the mill in order to use it elsewhere. It makes felling trees or bucking logs really nice -- like a hot knife through butter. It is kind of heavy, though.

In the fall of 2004 when I started milling some of the white oak and beech logs I had collected, I discovered that a chainsaw mill doesn't cut very fast. It takes a fair amount of patience to slice up a 20" white oak log. I cut a few hundred board feet of 1x6 lumber out of these logs before a friend brought over his WoodMizer LT-40 Super Hydraulic and finished up the rest of them. I have 3,000 board feet of 1x6 lumber that we cut from white oak, red oak, poplar, beech, and sycamore logs. I've cut several pine, poplar, and cedar 2xs with my mill since then. I've also cut a few beams, but most of the ones for the house I purchased from a local Amish sawmill.

One thing about the Procut that needed changing was the dogs for clamping the logs/cants on the saw. You can see one of them in the second photo. I spent nearly as much time setting the dogs to hold the logs as I did milling. Even then, they didn't hold things firmly enough. I needed to change this part of the mill. So, I gave it some thought.

What I came up with involved welding two rows of 5 inch pieces of 1" diameter metal pipe together. I welded these to the middle of the sawmill frame. I then welded two pieces of 2" box steel on the side of the mill near the two center log bunks. These pieces of box have a hole drilled in them and a nut welded on so that a bolt can be threaded in. This bolt holds a smaller piece of box inside the 2" box, allowing it to be adjusted up or down and locked into place. I welded small pieces across the heads of the bolts so that these can be locked in place by hand. These two dogs are perpendicular to the log bed to ensure squareness when cutting.

In the picture to the right, laying on top of the pipes is the heart of the clamping system. I took a 1" metal rod that fits inside the pipes (my rod actually was a 1" threaded rod on which I filed down the threads a bit) and welded a three inch piece of 2" pipe at one end. When a log is put on the mill, the dogs are set on the side, the log is pushed over against them, and then the clamp is inserted in the nearest pipe to the log that it will fit in. It is dropped down to the desired level and then, using the rod pictured here with it, it is turned so that the 2" pipe at the top presses against the log. The cam action of this clamp exerts a lot of pressure, holding the log in place. The clamp can be set to hold the middle of a log or the bottom of a cant, whatever is desired or needed. It works great and saves a lot of time.

Here's another view of the clamp. Definitely an improvement over the original design in the plans for the mill. I needed something that would work and that would be affordable. The only money I spent on it was for the 1" pipe. The rest of the system was constructed with scraps of metal that I already had. The time it takes to secure a log in position or hold a cant has been drastically reduced.

My sawmill isn't top of the line. But, I didn't have thousands of dollars to spend on a sawmill. By building this mill myself, even with buying new steel and a brand new saw, I still have less than $2,000 in it. All in all, I'm pretty happy with it.