Nicaraguan lumber yard (with the worlds best table saw!)

[Marc Seguin]

I'm currently in Nicaragua on vacation and yesterday I walked by a lumber yard. I thought you guys might like to see an epic table saw.

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I was tempted to buy a sheet of plywood just to watch the guys use this beast.

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The gentleman I asked said the woods were mostly cedro (spanish cedar), guanacaste, bocote, and jatoba. I've seen lots of wooden bowls and knicknacks in the markets made of cocobolo and honduran mahogany as well.

[peter gagliardi]

Nothing wrong with "simple yet efficient."

[Randy Red Bemont]

Very cool pics. It must have been an interesting walk through.

Red

[Jamie Buxton]

In the third photo, I see lumber racks with numbers under them like 2x2x450. What are the units? I'd expect centimeters. But the pieces look more substantial than 2 cm by 2 cm cross section.

[Marc Seguin]

The length is cm but the width and height are inches. They are also full dimension mostly. I say mostly because they vary by +/- 1/16.
All the people I've talked to have used cm for any dimension, so I'm not sure why they have inches written on the rack.

[Bruce Page]

Looks like a 3hp! :)

[Ken Fitzgerald]

Dust collection is a shovel and wheelbarrow?

[Andrew Joiner]

It's funny, most of the vacationers looking at those racks would say "that's so inferior to a lumber yard in my country".

We look at the racks and see unpolished rare gems. Great photos ,thanks.

[Charles Taylor]

Dust collection is a shovel and wheelbarrow?

Or a strong breeze.

[John Leake]

That lumber yard (not the saw) looks like my recollections of lumber yards from 40+ years ago in the US with my father.

[Marc Seguin]

The most impressive piece of wood I've seen so far is the dining table in the house we rented.

https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/-M71jZgTtwT0/VKiYRpraa5I/AAAAAAAAANs/-M-p9LGl7Gw/s512/IMG_4195.JPG

It's 98cm across and just over 2.5m long (that's about 38"x100") and the top is one solid slab. It's probably only about an inch thick, but it must have been one mother honkin' big tree. The grain is beautiful but coarse, and the wood appears to have fairly large pores. My guess would be Guanacaste based on the wood and trees I've seen here so far, but that's purely speculation.

https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/-A3S8nBdJS20/VKiYQhiD1sI/AAAAAAAAANk/PAD_ZVRWhzQ/s512/IMG_4194.JPG

The doors are pretty nifty timber as well. No clue as to what this might be.
This house is quite old being in the colonial district of Granada. The woodwork I've seen elsewhere hasn't been as well executed.

https://lh4.googleusercontent.com/-9Y36D1d6Okk/VKiZvNgDBBI/AAAAAAAAAbA/ElYwQwt1Chk/s512/IMG_4309.JPG

This is typical of what is being sold in the back street shops all over. The wood is bocote here according the proprietor. The furniture is all held together with nailed butt joints. The few rocking chairs I've seen with mortise and tenons are very sloppy fit.

https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-IC6Yv7w9Eww/VKiaSnCcJDI/AAAAAAAAAfQ/zBxsoPI6v4w/s720/IMG_4343.JPG

These guys are cleaning up a pile of offcuts that most of us would pay a king's ransom for. I'm pretty sure it gets split up into firewood for the cooking fires. Lots of wood burning grills here as propane is relatively expensive.

More to come as I'm keeping an eye out for how they work with wood.

[Mike Schuch]

Did you explain to the owner how to adjust the fence within .002" of parallel to the blade?