Harbor Freight Sawmill Complete Review

how's it going everybody my name's dave whipland you're watching bush radical and this is the harbor freight bandsaw mill today we're going to take a deep dive into this mill we're going to cut a lot of lumber and a lot of big big logs logs that are actually bigger than this mill is rated for we're going to take a look at every single component and part on this mill so you can get a really good idea of what you're buying if you choose to buy one of these mills we're going to evaluate the quality of the cut we're going to cut hardwood we're going to cut softwood by the time we're done you should have all the information you need to know if this is the right mill for you stay tuned [Music] on the harbor freight website it says that this mill will cut a 20 inch log and it will make a 20 inch cut i have this pile of big old white pine logs this one is a 24-incher and this is what we're going to start out with as we're milling through this big pile of logs today we're going to take time out and look at every individual component of this sawmill as we go now when i bought this mill used i got three blades with the mill i'm gonna use the best blade we have and i'm going to use one tank of fuel everything that you see cut in this video is cut off one tank of fuel and one blade i recently did a video on setting up this mill on my first impressions the link is down in the description if you haven't seen that video yet so for starters how does a little mill like this cut a big log is it bogging down does it feel like it doesn't have the guts for it no it's actually doing just fine the exposed blade area on this mill is pretty much all being used cutting slabs off this big pine and it doesn't seem to affect it it slows down your feed rate just a little bit because you can't shove it through as fast but it doesn't have any problem making that big wide cut so far the biggest challenge cutting logs this size has been just moving the logs around and keeping them on the bunk while you rotate them with a cant hook that's about it the mill seems to be able to handle whatever you can fit between the guides couple positives for the mill it rolls very easily on the track and i do like where the push handle is located seems very ergonomic for me i like the feel of it at the height that it's at [Music] now let's take a look at the predator motor that comes on this unit this is a 301 which is an eight horse motor it has a foam air filter that's underneath this plastic cover there's varying reports of whether this foam air filter is supposed to be oiled or not but it's supposed to be cleaned in hot soapy water there's the carburetor on the side of the engine there's the idle adjustment screw and if we look at the float bowl there's a bolt on the side for drain and fuel and there's a bolt on the bottom for removing the float bowl this carburetor gave me some fits and it had been sitting for a while and it was gummed up so i bought a replacement off ebay for 14 bucks i appreciate this sticker that shows which way the choke and the fuel shut off go a lot of times that's molded into the plastic itself and hard to read [Music] the carburetor is run off of a throttle cable i've replaced the original throttle cable with a solid wire version now if you look inside the fuel tank you have a initial fuel filter that's going to catch leaves and sticks and whatnot and at the bottom of the tank there is also another mesh fuel filter now this engine takes about a quart of 10 w30 motor oil and of course like most of these motors these small engines it has a fill port and a drain port on both sides of the engine so it works whichever way it needs to be mounted on whatever it's mounted on now the blade is run off of a single drive belt this belt acts as a tire for the drive wheel and as a power transmission from the engine and where the motor mounts on is how you adjust the tension of that drive belt this bolt right here in the front is welded to a flat plate that has two of the engine mount bolts passed through it by tightening the nut on the end of that bolt it will pull the engine in its mounting slots and tighten the belt this mill ended up taking a longer belt than what it called for in the manual so i'm writing that down inside the cage here it takes a b77 or b78 either one would work fine one thing i like about this mill is that a lot of the things that need to be heavy seem to be very heavy the bottom of the carriage where the wheels are mounted to is extremely heavy duty the the log bunks are they're adequate the track itself is very robust we'll take a closer look at that later one thing i don't like is i'm getting some big paint peeling in areas and of course being that this mill is used i don't know how the previous owner took care of it but there are areas i will have to repaint at some point now the first big log is all squared away into a can so it's going to be simple to cut my boards from here out i'm just going to slap them off one at a time now i'm cutting the thicknesses of these boards by the revelations of the handle about four cranks of the handle and one half of a crank for the kerf seems to give me about a one inch board there's the first one [Music] now the saw head is raised and lowered by a cable system let's take a good look at this system and see how it works first of all there's two cables one to the right one to the left side of the saw head they're anchored on these steel pins and they go around this double set of sheaves on the end of this sliding bar when you turn the crank you're either pushing that sliding bar out or you're letting that sliding bar come back in and you're either lifting up the saw head or you're letting the saw head down now if we follow these cables down we're going to see that they mount to either side of the sawhead left and right [Music] and they end down here at this closable link that is welded to this bolt now that bolt is the adjustment and with these two adjustment bolts you can raise or lower either side of the sawmill head and by doing that you can get the cutting blade perfectly parallel with the bunks on the sawmill track and that's how you get good true cants and good square beams once we have the saw head the height we want it for the cut these are the locking levers if you've ever used a chain binder it's pretty much the same principle those locking mechanisms they run this clamp there's a clamp that goes around each upright and as you lock those down it bites right onto that upright and that's adjustable too you can see the bolt in the back you can make it tighter or looser depending on how it's set up when you get it here you see the lubrication blade cleaning jug and this is a harbor freight pump sprayer the jug that comes with this mill is pretty much garbage this is your adjustment just a simple on off valve and of course the line goes from your jug past the valve down to your drip tube i kind of appreciate how rudimentary this system is it's just a hardware store valve it's a tank of some sort hose runs down the little copper tube is actually adjustable you can see the bolt on the side of that of that post you can loosen that bolt and then you can adjust that little chunk of tubing wherever you want it to land on the blade super simple but it's got all the adjustment that it needs and anybody can work on this system and you can find all these parts right down at the hardware store [Music] it's nice to know that the mill can handle that 24 inch log took a little bit of patience to get that cut down into a can and i had to be real careful about knots or any kind of protrusions and clean those off before i started making the passes otherwise you're just going to run out of clearance at some point so far i'm very pleased with the finish and the quality of the cut one of the problems i've run into is the wheel on the left hand side the rear wheel it likes to get clogged up with sawdust cleaning and checking your wheels after each log that'd be pretty good policy [Applause] now let's take a really good look at that saw blade guide system it's easy to get out of there it's just one bolt now this is a very simple blade guide system it has two blocks that the blade runs between and to back up the blade there is a roller bearing now that round piece of rod has a flat surface milled onto one side so when you tighten it up in its place it's going to hold that whole assembly straight up and down now the two guide blocks are held in with allen head bolts they're completely adjustable on the back side they have two nyloc nuts and they're held captive in this little channel so you don't have to worry about holding them with a wrench once you have a blade on the sawmill and it's set to the correct tension then you would adjust the guide blocks to match the blade there should be the tiniest amount of space between the blade and the guide blocks a lot of people will just use a piece of paper between the blade and the guide blocks when they set it and of course that roller bearing is going to support the back side of the blade now these blocks are three quarter of an inch by one inch and of course that whole assembly adjusts forward and backward by quite a long waist so it can be set to the blade once the blade is tracked properly and right above it is that copper tubing that we saw earlier that goes to the coolant lubrication tank now that copper tubing could be maybe an inch longer it might be a little easier to adjust that way but you can see how easy it'd be to take it out and change it my brother ryan has a few logs he wants milled up he's brought over three standing dead 16 inch ash logs now ash is a wood that they use very often for making baseball bats and these are dead and seasoned so this is going to be a good test for cutting hardwood these logs are hard [Music] now my brother ryan has owned a sawmill in the past so he knows what he's doing i can just sit back and watch [Music] now my brother is planning on building a tiny cabin and he wants decorative exposed rafters so what he wants out of this log is three by eights now go to the lumber company and try to find hardwood three by eights good luck this saw seems to be cutting about as straight as the track let's take a look at the track system here now everything on this mill is metric so these bunks are roughly three by six but not exactly they're about an eighth of an inch thick but not exactly this track is four inches by about 2 and 3 8 inches but not exactly so if you wanted to make your own track extensions it would be a little tricky but it is a thick track it's about 5 16 of an inch thick [Music] to set the tracking you tighten the blade tensioning handle until you get the proper tension and then rotate the idler wheel and then check the blade placement you want the back of that blade to be flush with the back of that steel wheel if it's not we loosen up our blade we would loosen the lock nut on our tracking bolt if the blade needs to sit farther back we would turn this in which would move the rod inside of here this direction which would take that band wheel and tip it just a little bit that way that would cause the blade to ride farther back on the tire of the wheel it's a little bit of trial and error but once you get it set up it's pretty good unless you have to change a drive belt or a blade might take a couple times tighten her up rotate the wheel a couple times check where the blade sits loosen it back up adjust the tracking tighten it back up check it again once you got it adjusted properly tighten down the lock nut on the tracking bolt and you're good to go [Music] [Applause] [Music] this is probably my favorite part of saw milling watching my little brother do all the work now this lumber is coming out pretty good even with that old blade it seems to be doing its job just fine now we're getting ready to cut all of these slabs down into their final size 3x8 let's take a good look at this log clamp you have this section of pipe that runs all the way across the track it's held in place by this steel bracket right here it's got a heavy chunk of steel rod welded to it this pipe articulates the upright can be locked on that pipe anywhere you'd like it to be so you can adjust how far out you want this log brace set at and of course there's a lock for that adjustment too from there the log is held in place with the spike end once that spike is set you can tighten it up by hand with this little crank now this log clamp works in conjunction with these log stops this mill comes with four log stops two shorts and two longs the short stops are about seven inches long and the long stops are about 18 inches long you just use whichever one makes sense at the time once a log is cut into a big square cant these short ones are just perfect make sure you keep them lower than your blade or you will ruin your blade now the long ones are fantastic for first cuts and for rolling cans now i'm going to roll this cant over and by having those long log stops in place it's really going to help me drop that can right where it needs to go now i could leave those in while they make a cut but i'll have to remove them pretty soon because of the height that they're sticking up at i definitely don't want to run a blade into those things the log stops and screw clamp are very simple but i don't have any complaints with them they work just fine [Applause] [Music] [Applause] the way we've got it worked out is ryan will do a log and then i'll do a log unfortunately the slog is about the biggest one we have and it's going to take a while not only is it a lot of wood to saw but it's kind of irregular it's kind of got a little bit of a bend to it it's got a lot of big knots and the clearance is going to be really really tricky with this look not to mention it's 28 inches across the butt top to bottom i think we're gonna have to reinvent the wheel on this one first of all the push handle is mounted on one of the uprights now when you raise the saw head it will only go up until it hits that handle so we're gonna have to remove that handle so we can get an extra four or five inches of lift out of the saw head now by removing the push handle it is going to give you a few extra inches of lift but there is one issue basically going to happen eventually your handle is going to hit your saw guard so even though when you remove the handle you could raise this head up an extra six and a half inches you're not gonna get all of that six and a half inches because of the handle with the saw head raised as far as it can go i'm just barely getting the clearances i need to get around this big log seems like i'm using the chainsaw as much as i'm using the sawmill on this lock every pass is requiring me to cut some part off this log so that the saw blade and guides can pass by even getting this log cut down on our way to a camp it's still a huge piece of wood and this is where you run into problems trying to cut a log bigger than this mill is designed for we ran out of space on this cut and trying to back out of that cut the blade popped off [Music] what we had to do is loosen the blade remove it from the saw cut that big slab off the top gently and get our blade not that big of an issue but you know you could uh get around this by trimming this log better before you put it on the mill or just try not to cut stuff this big with a mill this small we trimmed the log up a little bit better put the blade back on check tracking and finished our cut to be very fair i don't see any reason to try to cut logs this size on a mill this size i had these logs they needed to get cut up i used this mill to cut them up but i would try to stay around a 22 or less inch log now it says 20 but a 22 will go through there fine i got a 28 through there with a little bit of trimming it wasn't fun and i wouldn't want to do it again but it was possible when it comes to pushing this mill where the handle is located to me feels just about perfect i don't like the fact that it limits how high i can raise the saw head but i do think ergonomically it's setting in a really nice spot now i'm down to my last big log everything else here that was good size has been turned into sawdust or boards and by the time we're done with this log we should have a really good pile of boards wow that's a log of course i'll have to take that handle off one more time and get this saw head up as high as it goes but hopefully that's the last time i'll ever have to do that now a little sawmill like this isn't for everybody you have to have some way to supply yourself with logs or it doesn't do you any good you also probably have to have some use for the lumber or what's the point in the first place but for a couple thousand dollars i would have to say getting into this particular mill is pretty low risk so there it is guys there's my review of the harbor freight portable bandsaw mill i hope i've covered this and looked at every aspect and every part of this machine the way you would have wanted to look at it if you were standing right here walking around seeing how it all works and how it's put together i think it's a good product i think it's a simple product i think it probably has next to no customer service but on the other hand getting into milling your own lumber for two thousand dollars there's not a ton of options it's either this woodland mills or order something off alibaba and really roll the dice but i think all in all it's a well-built machine it's inexpensive it's rudimentary but it does its job so thank you guys for coming along with me i hope you've enjoyed this review and i hope it's been valuable to you if you're interested in this machine my name is dave whipland you've been watching bush radical be radical eh see you soon [Music] you

Channel: Bushradical

Views: 251,416

Rating: 4.9590545 out of 5

Keywords: harbor freight sawmill review, sawmill review, harbor freight sawmill, saw-mill, band saw mill, HF band saw mill, saw mill review, saw mill overview, sawmill, cut your own lumber, mill your own lumber

Id: BvjlSKtOOS8

Length: 21min 33sec (1293 seconds)

Published: Sun Sep 12 2021