This time I'm building a circular swingblade sawmill from scratch. The function of the mill is in its name - the blade swings 90 degrees making it possible to cut both ways while moving the carriage up and down the log resulting in dimensional lumber in one pass. I built a chainsaw mill ten years ago and milled lumber that I used for my cabin / sauna house project. Then I built a bandsaw mill five years ago and used the cut lumber to build a partition in my barn I currently call my workshop. Both of them worked great, bandsaw mill was faster than chainsaw mill for sure. But I think I can make an even faster mill and swingblade sawmill in my opinion is just what I'm looking for. There are different types of swingblade sawmills, one type utilizes a railway system where the saw carriage rides on rails so both rails are in the way when loading the logs. I want to build a beam-type mill where the saw carriage is suspended on a beam over the log that sits on a couple of wedges so it doesn't roll off while cutting. There will be no need to clamp the log down. Cut depth and width adjustments are all going to be made on the sawmill beam end frames. And to top it off - it will basically be a portable sawmill due to its build properties but I think it's only going to sit in my yard regardless of the portability.
In this video I'm messing around with the gas cylinder that helps to ease the swing motion and I'm fabricating hard stops for the horizontal rails etc. Hard stops will prevent the sawblade from hitting the ground when the sawmill gets lowered to the ground. The beam will hit the hard stops before the blade hits the ground so I don't have to worry about it when milling lumber. I swapped the smaller 4kW motor to more suitable 5,5kW motor that'll be more sufficient for the blade diameter I'm running (546mm/22"). I've been "sitting on" this custom order circular blade for almost two years now and I can finally work on this dream. I'm gonna try and use basic tools like angle grinder as much as possible (except lathe) so I'm gonna enjoy this project even more. I hope you will too!
This sawmill build is based on www.turbosawmill.com "Manual Mill" design and it is patent pending.
Swingblade sawmill build series: • Swingblade Sawmill Build
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Welding equipment borrowed from Spetselektroodi AS, Estonia:
Fronius TransSteel 2700 welder
Optrel Crystal 2.0 Welding Helmet
Hypertherm Powermax 45 XP plasma cutter