Beautiful Day for Milling

[John TenEyck]

I've been milling for cash the past couple of days. Just beautiful early fall weather. And I'm being spoiled because the guy I'm milling for has given me a young helper and a tractor with forks to load the logs onto the mill. The downside is he wants dimensional lumber, and that's a slower go than the random width I normally mill.



Yesterday, I found the drive belt on the mill was missing big pieces. Never seen that before, but I had a spare, so I changed it. Not too bad, maybe 30 minutes. Today the starter rope on my chainsaw broke. Another repair. Now I have a shorter starter rope.

I put a new blade on at some point this morning, made about two cuts and:




But when I inspected the blade I saw that the teeth weren't damaged much, but a dozen or so had bits of the nail bonded to the teeth. Some I could pick off with my fingers, others I removed with a pair of pliers. Amazingly, I cut another 200 bf or so with that blade, and it's still not done. Woodmizer Doublehard. Good stuff.

John

[John TenEyck]

I cut another 100 bf of so with that blade. As I was cutting the last log before swapping it out for a new blade:





That was the end of that blade, for sure. I put on a new blade, made about two cuts in the same log, after removing the screw, and:




Not good. Surprisingly, the blade again looked pretty good after I picked off the bits of nail stuck to the teeth. I rolled the log and made another cut. Oh no:




Well this isn't going well. But again, the blade wasn't trashed. Until:




That was the head of a pretty large nail, and it bent over a whole bunch of teeth.

I don't know where the guy got these logs, but he might decide to look elsewhere after he pays for the blades that are being ruined.

John