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Posted by D. Sherman on Tuesday, February 26, 2008 at 14:40:32 :
In Reply to: Re: The Aussies used a rig, like a stump grinder.... posted by Tony West OZ on Tuesday, February 26, 2008 at 12:59:02 :
An old-fashioned 2-man circular saw mill is a mighty scary machine as well, especially when the sawyer reaches down to adjust the guide blocks while the saw's running. He didn't like to shut it down because it was powered by an engine like I've never seen before. It was a gas-start, diesel-run engine. It had a carburetor and spark plugs, and you'd start it on gas, then when it was warmed up, switch it over to diesel. As I recall, the compression didn't change when you switched from gas to diesel, so it was a pretty weak naturally-aspirated diesel. He got it out of some old tractor. Naturally, the engine drove the blade through an unguarded driveline, and the husk shifted the feed works between forward and reverse via unguarded flat belts. The sawyer's lever was situated so he was pretty likely to get hit with any chips that the blade kicked out of the log, so he had a few pieces of old chain hanging in front of the blade to slow down the larger chunks. It was actually a pretty neat, well-built setup. It even had a mechanized log loader that took the logs out of the deck and delivered them to the carriage. The set-works were of course manual, and turning the log on the bunks was accomplished with a cant hook. In his operation, he called the two positions the "smart end" and the "dumb end". The "smart end" was the sawyer, who also set the log in the carriage and turned it, and the "dumb end" was the guy who pulled the green lumber and stacked it. I got to play "dumb end" for a while. The man was great at building machinery (he threw together a wood lathe about 10' long just so he could make some Victorian-style porch posts for some customer), but he clearly didn't waste any time or money on safety devices. He was probably about 60 and still had all his important body parts as far as I could tell, so he was clearly careful and lucky. When he reached down to adjust the guide blocks, about 2" away from a spinning 4' diameter blade, my friend and I just looked at each other in blank terror, but he did it like it was something he did every day (which was probably true) and he kept all his fingers.
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