Comparing $3000 sawmills - Is the WoodMizer LX25 worth it? Hudson, Woodland Mills, Norwood, Grizzly

hey guys woodmiser is out with a brand new sawmill and guess what it's cheap how cheap do you say well how's about this only three thousand dollars now it seems that wood miser is going after another corner another niche in the market with this cheap sawmill putting it in the range of a lot of other companies that are selling sawmills of like kind so in this video we're going to cover some of those other companies and we're going to look at some of woodmaster's competitors and we're going to see which sawmill may be the best fit for you now look i think it's always important whenever we talk about uh different brands and stuff like that of any product that we talk about our own personal biases before we do that isn't that refreshing that we actually reveal that well as most of you know who have watched my videos and have seen me work you know that i am sold out to wood miser i love the company wood miser i love the products they make and i always think that they're worth a first thought when it comes to buying any kind of a sawmill and so that's my bias however i do think we need to give a fair look to some of these other companies and see what they have to offer if you have one of these kinds of sawmills please put your comments below and tell us your opinion of the mill that you have so i've done something that i don't normally do with my videos and that is that i brought pages of notes right here and i'm going to go through the pages of notes and this helps me keep all of the spec information and all of that clear for going over lots of these meals i want to do it quickly because most of these mills are fairly comparable and the price points are fairly comparable and so what i'm trying to avoid doing here is trying to pick one mill that's three thousand dollars and then trying to compare it with another mill that would be like ten thousand dollars or perhaps a more expensive meal that you could get used for a similar price as one of these brand new meals well i think that there's actually quite a few different kinds of people that this kind of sawmill could be for the first one that comes to mind is the kind of person who is simply buying a sawmill they have one particular project and perhaps the cost is justifiable given whatever it is that they're making or perhaps it's the kind of person that just wants to cut a little bit of lumber they're not interested in cutting thousands of board foot of lumber or trying to be a high production and so for their own personal use perhaps they're buying it for lumber is expensive one of the things you learn early on in the sawmill business is that you are paying double or triple what it actually costs the sawmiller to cut a lot of the material that you buy so you do that yourself you are going to save cost obviously another type of person this would be the third kind of person is maybe the kind of person that is going to use this machine for a little while and then sell it perhaps it's an upgrade option fourth type of person is the type of person who maybe wants to get into the sawmill business but they don't know if the sawmill business is for them and so they want to start with something that is less cost and then knowing that most sawmills have a pretty high resale value they're going to take it and they're going to sell it once they learn if they really want to get into this whole game of saw milling or not and then they'll sell it and they'll take the down payment from that and put it into a bigger mill you know high risk high reward type of scenario but they want to be conservative going about the process so i've got five different companies that i'm going to look at to compare to the wood miser first i'm going to start with the hudson hunter camo now i'm getting these off of the website from every one of these people that makes these different sawmills and so i'm just going off of what is currently on the website and what i could see around the same price point now first thing i'll say about hudson is they have a lot of different models and it seems like sometimes maybe some of them are specialty models and and perhaps those names change over time but the hudson hunter camo is two thousand four hundred and forty nine dollars and so it's five hundred dollars under approximately what wood mizer is asking now here's normally the important info and i'm going to do this for every single one of these mills is what kind of horsepower can you get and what size log can it handle and so we're going to do that at a bare minimum and maybe some of these i'll add a little bit more information as i have it but the hudson hunter camo is uh you can get a 7 horsepower gas engine on it and it is a manual start so it's just like your push mower you have to go out and pull on the crank to start it nothing wrong with that and the maximum log capacity is 21 inches in diameter so you're under two feet diameter which is going to be about the norm for a mill this size the reason of course for that is is that the size of the engines that you're going to get on a lot of these mills simply would not be able to cut something that is say three feet across it just maybe you could do it but you'd have to go so incredibly slow uh that it just would not be cost effective to do so um you can put an extra nine foot of track so you have nine foot track lengths that you can put on these on the hudson and so that basically means you could be eternally long with it so you know if you're cutting uh long beams or something like that you could easily do it on that mill and i'm going to show you pictures of each and every one of these just like i did as you saw pop up there on the hudson you're gonna be able to go down into the description below on the video and they're going to be youtube links to every single one of these mills except for the hudson hunter camo now there are videos from independent youtubers that have put up their reviews and you might want to check those out but i want to give each company here an opportunity to have its own fair representation in its own advertising so that you can get the best look at it and so there's a video of something close to the hudson hunter camo and you'll see the link below again for all of these all right second company is the woodland mills hm126 now this sawmill has two engine options you can either get a nine and a half horse or you can get a 14 horsepower engine on this machine and the maximum log diameter you can do is 26 inches and what i call the resaw capacity or the max width of cut is 24 inches in diameter and so it's pretty pretty similar size there which means if you can get it on there you can probably cut slabs with it which i know a lot of people are into and it has a 10 and a half foot of of track with which to cut on and i'm not sure with the woodland mills if it's adaptable to longer track although most of these smaller sawmills uh you could or you could probably pretty easily rig that up the price of the woodland mills is only a hundred dollars off of wood misers currently it's three thousand and ninety nine dollars all right third one is the norwood lumberman mn 26. now their mill runs off of a 13 horsepower briggs and stratton of course everyone that's ever had an engine on anything probably had a briggs and stratton at some point and so what that means is is the parts are going to be very easy to find and perhaps it's even adaptable to the point where if you were not happy with your 13 horse you could buy another one and put a bigger engine on there without too much hassle i would think i'm not sure how the mounting would work with that but i'm pretty sure you could do that because guys have been doing that since the beginning of the engine now this has the same log size cutting ability as the woodland mill so you can put a 26 inch log on there and the maximum saw width is 17 inches at least that's what i saw i would hope it's bigger than that quite honestly uh you know i'm trying not to be critical of these companies and basically just give them some representation on this channel but 17 inch saw width is not impressive when you can put a 26 inch log on i'm just going to say that and this one does cost more this is this is one of the more expensive ones and then i have an honorable mention after this but 4 397 for the norwood now norwood does make a lot of good products besides sawmills and one of those is a winching system for pulling logs around and that's something to go look at but they also have all kinds of things that can adapt for your four-wheeler or for your tractor to pull logs and log moving type of equipment and so they're they're worth a look um again they are about fourteen hundred dollars more than the wood miser is going to be and as you've seen the picture if you go look at their videos you'll see it is a little bit more robustly built than the three thousand dollar category and so you are getting a little bit more of what you pay for there if i remember correctly the norwood looks like it does have plastic on it and uh i can tell you um when you're moving logs around and and there's just all kinds of action around the sawmill that plastic is not going to last after the first week that plastic is going to be gone um and so i i get nervous when i see that again i could be wrong about it being plastic but just the paint scheme and everything that's what it looks like all right one honorable mention and this is a company that everybody knows about but you may not have thought to contact about for saw milling needs and that's the company of grizzly grizzly industrial and so grizzly has an offering for fifty five hundred dollars and the only reason i mention them i know they're twenty five hundred dollars out from the wood miser is because it is an option but i'm going to tell you a couple things and i know that um just like when people shop at harbor freight people shop at grizzly they they shop there for price more than anything occasionally you stumble upon a good product or a good deal but for the most part you know you're getting something that's probably made in china and that's why the the cost is cheaper and you also get something that looks eerily like other products um because china is the rip-off capital of the world um as you can tell um i would i would prefer american-made myself um but the grizzly just some statistics here is a 13 and a half horse briggs and stratton so the norwood has a 13.5 briggs and stratton the grizzly has a 13 and a half briggs and stratton you basically get 12 foot of track and it says the maximum log diameter can handle is 28 inches and the maximum width of cut is supposed to be 22 inches and so one thing that you'll notice when you look at the grizzly is the way that the elevating mechanisms work and the way that the saw engages is very very similar to how the wood miser lx25 operates it might be in a little different location or a little different but it's essentially a very similar thing i also don't see that the grizzly is that much more robustly built which when you're paying fifty five hundred dollars even for an entry mill uh you want something comparable so for 5500 you could go up to like a wood mizer lt10 or maybe even an lt15 sometimes there's sales in the lt15s and you can get those for six thousand dollars and the i can tell you from seeing the lt15 in person that that is built extremely robust and strong and you could run an lt15 your whole life and and many people have and so i think the grizzly is overpriced so that's that's kind of my criticism of that and again i'm not trying to be critical just allow you to give you the links below and for you to look at them yourselves but that's kind of my opinion on the grizzly uh if they sent me one for a demo i wouldn't turn it down but i would be honest with the review all right so let's talk about the one that we came here for and that is the wood mizer lx25 the wood mizer lx 25 has two engine options a seven horsepower gas or a nine and a half horsepower kohler gas okay wood miser i know that you're trying to hit a price point here but here's the thing you got people in similar price categories that have higher horsepower engines and in a sawmill what you want is horsepower at the end of the day you need to be able to cut through the log and even with a cheap mill you don't want to be there all day cutting it now the nine and a half horse for the size of the mill is adequate i'm just going to say though flat out for my sawmill experience which is pretty plentiful at this point seven horsepower ain't gonna cut it and that is pun intended on that and so if you got one of these you would just about have to go with the nine and a half horsepower i would think to feel like you could accomplish anything during the day the other things uh so the max log diameter is 26 inches good size log on there just uh just the exact same as you would get with the norwood or the grizzly which are more expensive mills it is the same as the woodland mills which is the similar price point and it has a 22 inch max width of cut and so 22 inches look guys i'm telling you i mean i know that uh slabbing is the big deal nowadays you're not going to be able to slab or do these super slabs with one of these mills you're not going to want to modify to make it wide or anything like that and so you're mostly just going to be producing lumber and i can tell you very few people have machinery that have like 15 or 16 inch wide joiners or have the equipment to even mill material that is wider than six to eight inches and so you know i wouldn't worry too much about how how wide they can resaw i do wonder about that norwood though why it's only 17 inches if it can handle such a large log but you're going to be able to cut 22 inches now even with the nine and a half horse it's going to take you some time to do that but you could do it and also the max length you're going to be able to cut on the wood miser is 12 and a half feet 12 feet 6 inches so that's pretty good you can put a good size log on there most of the lumber that people buy is eight to ten feet and so that's uh that's definitely adequate for sawing lumber or making your own lumber and you can add track to it so if you have a need for for a longer track you can definitely add on to that all right so what i want to conclude with now is just really like what are the main things that you want to consider if you're looking for a sawmill and really it comes down to four things and these are in no particular order but the first one is how robustly rigidly how strong is the machine that you're buying in terms of its actual construction you want something as close to box frame as you can get none of these machines are really box framed in and so you want to look at the robustness if you're going for a cheaper mill which one looks like it was built the best you know check check the seams on the welds for example the grizzly that's 5500 is pretty much just spot welded like they didn't even take the time to completely weld all the fins in and everything like that the wood misers are always going to be welded all the way down the line so that's something to think about another thing that you want to think about second thing is what is the horsepower that you can get that you can get on the machine if if seven horsepower is the best you can do um i'm telling you that's going to be a long haul now i have a resaw bandsaw in my shop it's not it's not a sawmill it's just a resaw bandsaw and it has about a five horsepower motor on it and you have to go slow with that to really cut it now it will do it um but you know i've worked on machines that have 15 horsepower electric motors that are resaws and even those sometimes struggle when you get to the max width to really cut through something and so the horsepower is a big deal and so you know if you're daydreaming about cutting tons of lumber a day on a seven horsepower machine you're not going to be able to do that so go as big as you can for the price that's in your budget third thing is the add-ons and the options that you can do to it again is it is it possible to go up to bigger engines on it would you be able to upgrade in the future if you weren't happy with the power what is the length that you can put on it you know i mean like i said eight to ten feet is adequate for most people but what if you had a special project and say you got a commission from someone that says can you catch me long beans from my house or something like that and they got to be 20 foot long would it be worth it to buy the track to get the job and do that you know those are all things to think about does it have power feed options that you can add to it does it have a debarker option that you can add on to it you know what about crazy things like lasers and and the lubrication system and things like that i mean are these things able to be upgraded and would you care about it and so those are all things to think about lastly and this is a biggie is what is the customer service like for the company you're buying it from i think this goes for just about any tool that you buy but this is the thing that really sells me on wood miser and again i listen guys i do not make a dime up of wood miser i've made i've made lots of videos showing my machine work showing what it can do at max capacity and beyond i have represented them and presented them year after year and i'm telling you guys i haven't even gotten so much as a hat or a t-shirt now i'm not saying that to make them sound bad i'm just saying that to let you know i'm not paid off in any way by wood miser okay but what i can tell you is this wood miser has the best customer service that you will ever have in your entire life they have people that know every nut and every bolts and every wire on your machine and believe me things will need to be fixed even on a brand new machine over time you will need to be able to get a part to fix something on your machine and wood miser can not only get you the part but they can help walk you through it and guess what if you own their machine their customer service is absolutely free i mean think about what that cost is to have an expert help you on that a hundred dollars an hour and i have sat on the phone literally for hours you know combined time hours over different machines that i've had fixing things and so customer service is a big one to think about i have heard good things from some of these other companies when i've read reviews on customer service but again that's up to you to check those things out all right so one of the things i want to talk about just to conclude this video is what you saw in the description of the video and that is wood miser's advertising strategy and their aggressiveness and going after niche markets and so these three thousand dollar mills are really a big clue as to what wood miser has been trying to accomplish the last few years and going after every single corner of the market that they possibly can now the three thousand dollar mills are a big tell to me and here's why because their bread and butter again has been portable bandsaw mills and some stationary mills and some industrial mills but the lt-35 and specifically the lt40 machine which is the one i have i've had two of them now is the workhorse of the industry you could throw a rock and hit five guys that own a wood mizer lt40 or have had one in the past and so that machine now sells for around thirty thousand and if you get the super version you're gonna be somewhere around forty thousand dollars for an lt40 the fact that they're going after three thousand dollar mills is telling that that is not enough for them anymore as the company grows as it expands as it's under new leadership of the last few years it's looking for ways to diversify and gain more niche markets and so wood miser is going after all kinds of things here's some of the other kinds of products that they make they make log splitters they make wood planers and wood molders for woodworking purposes they make lawn mowers for goodness sakes now i don't know if they're still doing that i think you could still find one but they had owned a lawnmower company that was making the exact same mower and they just rebranded it painted it orange and made it a wood miser which is common of course we all know that but here's another telling one and i'm not sure that you can buy this mill in the u.s yet but most people know what a lucas mill is and of course a lucas mill is basically a portable uh circular sawmill and instead of like the old uh trolley mills that run the log through the blade you run the blade through the wood and it's a giant circular mill well wood miser again the link for that is down in the description box wood miser has made an identical carbon copy of the lucas mill and so even bandsaw mills are not enough they're making bandsaw mills they're making basically circular mills like the lucas mill they've gotten away from the cantilever design and and now they're doing the twin pillar design that is more common and so they're really just trying to find anybody they can to make one of these and so here's the here's the question that i have about this that you guys might want to think about is do you think that this is a good plan of success for wood miser going forward i'd love to be a fly on the wall in the board rooms when they're talking about developing new products and advertising strategies for these things because one thing that i've learned is that the best way to success is to do one thing and to do it very very well and wood miser has done that for decades with their with their portable band saw mills but now they seem to be going after every nap and fly that they can find to try to have niches in the market and so whether it's the cheaper bandsaw mills or it's the lucas mills or it's the bandsaw mills the cantilevers or the twin rail designs you know or whether it's lawn mowers or log splitters or whatever it is i mean they seem like they just want to go after every little thing of course whenever you do something like this it takes tremendous amounts of time and money research and development advertising in different areas and the difficult part of it is is that most companies are only known for doing one thing unless you are a super crazy massive company and granted wood miser is getting there but only people like you and me that probably have saw mills or are considering getting a sawmill have ever even heard of wood miser you know everybody has heard of ford or chevy or bmw but very few people have still to this day heard of wood miser and so each one of these things takes more advertising more research and development and how many people even knew that wood miser had a lawn mower how many people know when they go looking for a wood splitter you know that they're not going down to tractor supply and just getting their county line log splitter that they're looking for a wood miser log splitter and their log splitters are not cheap they're like ten or twelve thousand dollars um and most of wood mizer stuff is more on the expensive end and so who are the people that they're going after with a lot of these products that's just kind of a question that i'm wondering about again it's not like an angry rant or anything like that i have expressed my love and my devotion for wood miser but what is the end goal here is it to employ as many people as possible that's a worthy goal is it to spend as much money as possible and start to minimize what they were good at originally for the sake of these other things that are that are really to me seemingly more pet projects um i don't know what do you guys think guys this is all that i have on it i'm really i'm interested in your opinion i want to know what you think about this i want to know what you think about wood buys or strategy and again if you've had another one of these mills that i've mentioned and you like it or you don't like it go ahead and put that in the comments below and we'll have a fun community dialogue as that conversation goes along thanks guys god bless

Channel: Southern Indiana Sawmill

Views: 523,344

Keywords: Sawmill, Mill, lumber, wood, woodworking, lucas mill, hudson, woodland mills, grizzly sawmill, norwood, cheap tools, woodmizer

Id: x8CJYTOOt7s

Length: 24min 49sec (1489 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 26 2020