100 Dollar Portable Sawmill | chainsaw Mill | DIY

we got a tiny one [Music] everybody welcome back to makers playground today we're talking all about our hundred dollar sawmill hashtag saw not included so back in september of 2018 i posted what i called the fifty dollar sawmill made out of two by fours it was a really simple project and this is kind of the culmination of that i wanted to make a few improvements and try a couple of different things so today we're going to talk a little bit about that we're going to cut some more logs up and show you how well this works and explain a little more about the sawmill so what i want to do is tell you about the changes that i've made to the sawmill some of them i'm really glad i made some of them not so much first of all the track itself i made some changes to this one of them was good the other i wish i wouldn't have made that change so right here you'll see that we have a little 45 coming down so i cut an angle here so i brought this down and the reason i did that is i want to run my cable for turning the hand cranky thing that's a that's a technical term as before i just came straight across like this the other thing we did is added steel to this instead of using the little wood add-ons right here i'm not that excited about that change you know this was an extra expense quite frankly it's not really adding anything to the build so if i had to do this again i would just use a wood piece right here now what this does is it allows me to come under here and capture the carriage so it won't rock off and it'll help kind of hold it steady the other thing i really liked is this cable track that we have and we're using just a boat um a boat winch you know it's thing you put on the front of a boat that you load and unload boats off of a trailer with now to make the cable management really simple we literally just have a stop block here cable screwed here and it runs right across the center all the way down to the carriage and on the bottom of the carriage i have a pulley mounted right underneath here now i know you're thinking it's going to snap it doesn't it's going to come off of there but it doesn't it stays pretty taunt so you don't have to worry about it jumping out that comes up to our boat winch now the bolt winch is a geared winch so it has a large small gear here large gear here which makes cutting through this really super easy one of the things you have to be careful with when you're doing this is that you can literally pull this saw so hard that it'll jam up stop or break your system so you want to be very aware of the amount of pressure and torque that's being put on the blade as you're cutting through you don't want to go too fast so i changed the carriage so it was riding on steel and i put some bearings inside of here uh thinking that you know what we're going to be using this a lot obviously with prices of lumber now we're going to be using this a lot a lot i wish i wouldn't have done it now before in the old plant set that we have available it just it rides wood to wood and i just came out every once a week or so and just waxed you know using furniture paste wax and that kept it really nice and even the other thing i don't like about this is it seems like the the sawdust builds up a lot more than the other one did with it with the wood sitting on the wood it kind of plowed the sawdust out of the way it never became an issue the one thing i do like about the change i made is rather than having to slide this whole thing on from the end i have these capture mechanisms so i can just take these capture mechanisms out and lift the whole carriage right off of the saw so i like that change but honestly i think i'll probably go back to just a flat carriage riding right on top of the track itself it doesn't make it any easier it's an added complication for building so just like i had in the old plant set that's the way i'm going to go back to one of the other changes i made from the plans was i made this handle slightly smaller before i kind of had it going all the way across it was this big thing but in order to get my winch right in the middle of the carriage i made this smaller and that was probably a pretty good move i'm really glad that i did that with this and a big change that we made that i think is probably one of the best things is actually adding a trigger pull mechanism before i just had tape wrapped around the handle and i literally had some paracord that would just go underneath underneath it and i would pull the paracord when i wanted the trigger of the saw to pull down so this was a fun this was a really fun change i'm not 100 satisfied with this design what i did have is a bolt under here that secures it to the handle but even with that it was still vibrating off so i i have this temporary clamp on it so that design is going to change a little bit but i do like at the having this the bike handle there and when i pull that the saw goes it's a very comfortable way to run the saw next up again you're going to it's kind of a reoccurring theme here i changed the size of the saw the saw tower i made it a little bit smaller now i thought you know making it a little bit smaller i could make this a little bit shorter get a little bit more cutting capacity but honestly making the smaller probably wasn't the smartest decision i liked having it before i kind of had this big saw tower here so i could actually set my saw up on top of it and mount a little vise for sharpening the teeth doing any maintenance i needed on the saw and i made this also a little bit taller than the last one as well which really isn't needed i mean we're running a 26 inch bar on this we'll probably upgrade to a 30 inch bar but this is just over a 70cc saw so i'm never going to get bigger than a 30 inch bar which brings me to saws you can really do this with pretty much any saw as long as you keep a couple things in mind your feeds and speeds the type of blade that you're using so whether if you're running a really small saw you're not going to get the big logs you're going to be cutting smaller logs but switching from a standard chain to what's called a ripping chain and i'll put a link in the description box if you want to learn more about those can make a big difference in the performance of cutting through the long long side of the grain rather than cross cutting having that ripping chain on the saw makes all the difference in the world but it's a you know true rule of thumb when you start talking about saws the bigger the saw the more cc's the saw the bigger the log you're going to be able to cut comfortably so as you can see i have a drill on top of the tower the drill basically just lets me move the saw up and down easily you could definitely put a hand crank on there obviously i don't want to put a hand crank on there it's a lot nicer just to pull the trigger and the saw moves to its location and that really does make it just it's one more thing that makes it really nice and easy now i have had people say um why not put a drill here and that's because you need to feel the cut it's like anything you need to be able to feel what's going on with the saw whether you need to slow this the cut down speed the cut up it really depends again back to that the size of saw that you're cutting and the chain you're using you're going to have different pressures you want to be able to feel what's going on whether you need to slow down or whether you can speed up and that kind of thing to by putting a drill on here could really just you know just be in a bad situation so having that crank on there you can kind of feel all the things that are coming through the handle and the crank knowing whether to slow down or speed up your cut so one of the big questions i've gotten over the last couple of years is how i mounted the saw now that's not included in the plan set so pay attention you'll see these two holes drilled in the bar drilling a hole through chainsaw bars can be a little bit tricky but the trick is to use a very high quality blade or a very high quality drill bit and use oil and then run slow 400 450 rpm on your drill press and you're going to have no trouble the trick is the high quality drill bit don't go down to home depot and buy one of the dewalts thinking that it's going to work great it won't find a nice quality drill bit to drill the holes so i drilled two 5 16 inch holes and then i drilled the corresponding holes through this piece of wood here this is two pieces of baltic birch these are 5 16 bolts that come through now i have it screwed in for the back right here i have it screwed in through the bottom right here and i have it all this also the second support screwed into the back right here so i have a little over an inch and a half of meat kind of hanging onto this right here and you know some people may feel a little weird about using wood i'm telling you it works just fine plywood here plywood there and a nice piece of wood right there and it's going to work great so it's really quite easy to thing to do if you take your time and do it right and the last thing i did for mounting the saw is i drilled a small hole in the back here because there's a little bit of movement that just kind of gives it one more little point of being secured and that's it that's how i mount the saw on the sawmill so one fun little feature is just these indicator marks right here so i have a knob right here i can loosen up and adjust this to whatever i want to adjust it to as far as height goes so when i get my saw to where i want to make that first cut i can then move this indicator guide up to one of my tick marks tighten it down now i'm so when i bring the saw back down i just go to the next tick mark and that's going to give me an inch and a half cut inch and a half plus the blade width is added to those tick marks so i'm going to get an inch and a half slab when i use those tick marks for cutting it just makes it really easy you don't get your tape measure out and it's just a really good way of keeping your wood consistent so for those of you that are interested we have plans available for what we call the 50 saw mill obviously lumber prices are a little higher now so it's gonna cost a few a few bucks more to build it there's not enough significant differences between this and that one that make that add value to it to make changes to the plans so if you buy the plans you can obviously see the changes that we made here and if you want to make those changes you can the one thing i will say over and over again is don't get fancy pants with the with the carriage and the guide wood on wood is fine just make sure that you wax it once a week or when you're using it and if you're storing it in a garage or indoors one of the nice things about this particular thing is you can unscrew the handle you can unscrew the tower so it just breaks down to this really compact simple to store sawmill and you can throw it in the back of your truck and take it wherever you want now because we're going to be using this a lot i built a permanent station for it but if you see my old video and i'll link that below so you can go watch that the track right here would just screw to a couple pieces of 2x4 with a little tee on them you could throw in the back your truck and take it out in the woods basically take it anywhere you need to to cut logs so it's very very portable it just so happens that we're going to be using it a lot right here so i built a nice flat permanent station for it the trick to making sure that when you're saw milling you're getting good straight boards is make sure your base is flat so if you check out the old video see how we did it make sure that those things are level or flat not necessarily level but just co-planar to the saw blade so if you've watched other sawmill videos online you can always it always they're all sped up or they just like do little cuts through the material sawing through a log takes some time now granted this is only 16 17 inches and but going through this is going to take a little bit time so i thought what might be fun is to show you an actual cut without speeding it up without editing from start to finish and see what that looks like so we're going to do that now i'm guessing this is going to take about a minute 20 maybe a minute 30 to cut through so if you want to just kind of fast forward through that you can otherwise let's cut some woods [Music] foreign [Music] [Applause] [Music] so [Music] having way too much fun with this sawmill here at playground one of the things i'm doing right now to hold the log is i'm just putting in these blocks and a screw attaching them with screws for now obviously there's much better methods and i have some really cool ideas but we'll save that for an upcoming video right now we just want to cut wood [Music] [Music] hey everybody thank you so much for watching today really appreciate it we're all here at the playground having a blast with this it's kind of fun just to cut logs you know we've got quite a few dead ones laying around and we're already starting to source more so this thing's going to get a workout now in upcoming videos we're going to accessorize this for log holding we're going to do some stuff on moving logs around easier with you know simple builds so all that's coming so you're not going to want to forget to subscribe and make sure that you click that bell notification so you get notified when our videos come out also if you're interested in building this we do have the old set of plans available i'll put a link in the description box below with those plans and what we've shown you today you guys can customize your own sawmill the way you want it and uh be sawing logs as well so with that said i'm gonna get back to it this is all kinds of fun thanks for watching oh

Channel: izzy swan

Views: 1,344,140

Rating: 4.9404244 out of 5

Keywords: How to, diy, tablesaw, tools, projects, woodworking, shop projects, jigs, band saw, Izzy swan, portable sawmill, portable chain saw saw mill, Chainsaw, chainsaw mill, sawmill portable, sawmills in action, sawmill, homemade saw mill, homemade sawmill, homemade sawmill build

Id: bzjZ0qla_to

Length: 15min 51sec (951 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 12 2021