Let the Sawdust Fly | Our New Cost Cutting Way to Build

good morning everyone today is june 14th and we are very excited yes we're very excited because almost five months ago four and a half months ago we made a purchase that we are really really looking forward to this shipment was shipped to us on a barge all the way to alaska from new york and we just got the call that is there waiting for us sitting on the loading dock it's about two hours of a drive away and we've got our trailer hooked up and we're ready to go right let's do it well no matter where you go in this world you can't get away from the traffic about an hour into our journey and something's going on dead stopped on the freeway here oh no we're doing one mile an hour that's pretty good it's running where's it going i don't know why it's running hour later we're finally up to the speed limit again i don't even know what happened there was there was nothing there they were fixing a guardrail so here we go [Music] okay they got it here we're just at the wrong building so we gotta go around the block you need to run around yeah yeah it's there i saw it you saw it has our name on it how many pallets is it just one it's just one pallet and two boxes the cool boxes what's that does it come in the cool boxes part of it then maybe i can slide it off that was perfect huh the engine the motor yeah i see a cooler let's put a couple straps on it and call her good oh yeah colder motor what could be in all these boxes that we waited four months for and weighs 965 pounds okay i hope we don't hit any traffic on the way home see if we can get her there [Applause] well we made it home in one piece and i don't know if you could read the name on the side of the box but it says norwood and this is a norwood sawmill this is their lm29 model like we mentioned before we bought this a while ago it took them a while to get it built they were backward on a lot of parts and it took them about a month to get it shipped up here to alaska we were very excited to have this thing we got a lot of projects planned for it but unfortunately we have not been able to get our gravel delivered up here and we can't get this thing assembled until we have a nice level pad so until we get that gravel delivered this thing is going to sit in the trailer and we'll see you guys when we're actually unboxing it and putting it together and making our first cuts [Applause] [Applause] [Applause] so okay [Music] well at least i put that one down right so everyone's wondering [Applause] [Applause] well it has been about three weeks since we picked up our sawmill and we are going to be working on putting that together today we have been very busy here the last three weeks we had a ton of gravel delivered we had the local gravel company working double time for us they had two trucks bringing us gravel and one day and they brought us 12 10 yard loads of gravel which is all behind me one of our friends is nice enough to also let us use his tractor which made it pretty easy for us to get all this gravel smoothed out we've pretty much extended our land we want a little more usable space over here to park things and we have a big project planned that's going to be kind of going around the conex if you look back here we extended our land a little over 20 feet so it took a lot of gravel the land pretty much used to end here and it kind of went into bob kind of treat areas we took down a bunch of trees and as you can see we have a ton more room back here we got the boat back here and the reason we did all this is for a future project that is going to involve the sawmill we need to cuddle a bunch of lumber for it might be kind of hard to tell but the conex has been moved it hasn't been moved very much but nonetheless it was still a pain we had to pull every single thing out of it we cleaned it up we used the tundra and a high lift jack we moved it over about four feet and forward about four feet so it was a long process for just a little bit of movement with the connects the original plan was to put the sawmill over here but after we spread all of our gravel and we've kind of measured out our project here it's going to take up a lot of room and aaron and i both agree that we're just not going to have the room for the sawmill over here if we were going to put it here it was really going to block an area that we like to snow plow a lot of our snow in the winter so we came up with a new plan the sawmill is going to be going over by the woodshed so let's head over there we're going to start putting her together so this is where the sawmill is gonna go it's not perfect we do snow plow over here so we are gonna lose this place for snow plowing but it's basically what we have to work with um this is kind of the best area we could figure out we're going to put this thing the sawmill i believe when you buy them they can cut like a 13 and a half foot long maybe 12 and a half feet but we bought a few extensions for ours so we can cut over 20 feet so our sawmill is going to be pretty wide it's going to run this way right here the sawmill is sitting over there on a pallet with a tarp over it we've got all of our snow machines parked over here it's kind of like the junkyard so basically norwood wrote a novel on how to put this thing together this thing is intense i have a feeling it's going to take a while i read a few things online one guy said it took him two months to put it together one guy said it took him and his friend about nine hours i'm hoping we're closer to the nine hours because i don't want to be out here in two months putting the sawmill together it's about 10 o'clock in the morning we've had a ton of rain but it is not raining right now so we're gonna get started putting this sawmill together see if we can figure it out these are the these are the blades got it all right first box 10 a.m 10 a.m here we go [Applause] okay put it together eat that quarter inch flange there you go no but i'll drop it because i didn't know what size i needed okay all right we're about two hours and 45 minutes into this thing and i think it's going pretty good not as bad as thought it was gonna be uh it's definitely a lot longer than i thought it was gonna be this thing is huge we added on the two eight four foot extensions so we're eight feet longer than just the standard one we're putting in another thing that we need to get because we're a lot longer it's the log dog kit it's like another clamping section for this end portion i'm pretty sure the hardest part so far has been getting this thing level we just have it on two by fours right now until we actually get the sawmill up and running we can cut some bigger beams i'm thinking like six by six or eight by eight beams and then we can like put it in its final position and uh get it exactly level but pretty good so far when we're done with this part we're gonna start working on the carriage for the engine you mean to the side okay that's pretty good if i come my way ahead that's really intense arm looks like something they build roller coasters out of yes the same stuff okay five hours in to building this thing it's actually not that bad it's kind of fun once you get the hang of it the instructions i think are really good everything's labeled really well and we've reached a point where i can now do this which is kind of cool this basically will lift up the bandsaw you know up and down for your cuts and then if i haven't done it correctly it should just hold it there and then you should be able to go back down but our next step we're going to raise this up per the instructions and i think we're gonna start working on the bottom of this i don't know but again about five hours in not too bad at all we're getting there well i think we're about eight hours in it's getting kind of late and it's starting to rain a little bit but this isn't as fun anymore it's a lot of work there's a lot of pieces on these on this uh whole sawmill that i feel like they could have just pretty much done at the factory like little little latches these little screws you have to put pretty much everything together except for the motor that was in one piece thankfully but still got more work dude we're still chugging along we gotta get them all in do you have to know everything right now babe no i was just sitting there looking at it trying to figure it out man [Laughter] [Music] this is about to pop though there we go there we go see these are two with that allen wrench i had put that thing down allen wrench right here no it was a single okay well 10 hours later we're i'm going to say we're officially done all we have to do is put some oil in the motor i got to see if i have any oil here and we got to fire her up and see if she goes it wasn't too bad towards the end started to get a little frustrating a couple of these little tiny things were hard to figure out but all in all it was pretty easy assembly we did order an auto lube kit and what that is is when you hit the throttle it'll send out the water in the loop tank and automatically lube the blade what the sawmill comes with is you have to manually turn it on and off but it didn't include any instructions on how to put the auto loop kit that i ordered in um so i can't put that in yet i couldn't figure out how to get it on there so we got the regular one hooked up i have to just tidy up a little bit of my wiring there's a couple um cut off switches um because this thing won't run unless the panels are on the front it also has a kill switch i gotta zip tie those up and like i said we got to put some oil in the motor and some gas in it and i'm pretty sure we're ready to fire this thing up [Music] [Music] it's trying to choke works i think i have the uh the throttle hooked up too tight because see how the blade's spinning yeah when it's neutral it shouldn't be spinning so let me your way because this this end of the log is smaller and that's bigger we didn't buy the toe board thing you know i mean so we gotta do we're gonna just get some little shims looks pretty good all right well we finished the setup yep the motor started up fine it ran great we really like the kohler motors we have a kohler generator and we love that thing i had to make a couple adjustments with the throttle it was uh i had it adjusted too tight so it was kind of throttling up and the blade was spinning but we got it perfect now it's ready to cut eric pretty much got the second half of this done i think all would you say it took 10 hours about 10 hours and we totally made a mistake and we realized it about halfway in i don't know how we messed up on this but we ended up putting this whole thing on completely backwards so we would have had to operate it well it wouldn't have worked out that way but the operator's side was over here and you can't run it that way so we needed to switch it we got it taken off worked out fine i think for the most part everything else went went okay so i think we're excited to use it am i right we're very excited the only thing we have to do is figure out how to put the auto water lube kit on we're going to use the one that it comes with which you just have to open the valve a little bit when you start cutting not that big of a deal so what that does is it just basically lubes the blade as it's going through the wood that you're cutting and since we are cutting pine norwood recommends putting a little bit of dish soap in with the water loop so i got a little bit of dish soap in here we got it filled up with water and everything seems they're working first we are cutting beetle kill spruce pine we have a 12 foot log sitting right here we just loaded on the sawmill it's gonna be our first log and we're cutting six by six little beams they're gonna go basically underneath the sawmill and kind of so we can permanently level it right now we just have little two by fours underneath it we may not keep the sawmill here in the future with the snow but it's a big thing and this is like one of the best areas we can find on our property right now our whole reason for getting this we you know planned this quite a few months back and it really was because we have our another property that we are working on developing something down there and we have so many resources around us for wood with the spruce beetle kill trees we want to put in a d log cabin so yep with the price of lumber we thought it would be awesome investment to get one of these things and like ariel said a d log cabin build with this thing is going to be awesome down to our second property but we're going to kind of get used to using this thing and we got a bunch of projects around here we're going to do before we even get started down there you ready to get started let's do it all right ear plugs got safety glasses we've got our log clamped in and we're going to make our first cut we're just going to cut right along the top we'll see how she does okay well having never used a mill only using a chainsaw mill this is crazy how smooth this cuts it's like you can't even feel the wood that's pretty nice was that hard work at all no i could do it with one hand it's like it you can't even feel the wood it was pretty smooth that kind of let's see how it cut though i mean that took me like six seconds there we go and then here for now so you put that down like perfectly smooth and square yeah this is that's a beauty i don't know how big it is i'm gonna go grab my tape measure and see it's basically wanted to cut something i want to see how it turned out it turned out awesome it's a really cool beam pretty sure this beam right here already paid for the sawmill well maybe not yet but it will i'm gonna work on getting this to like a six by six that's what a norwood recommends that you you put this thing up on so there we go look at how beautiful it is eight nice about seven and a half so you cut a half inch off this we need to take a half inch off the top of this to get it to six inches and this is kind of the measurement guide let's see if we can use this so if i have it set up correctly i should be able to get our line to six inches and that should cut exactly six inches so let's put our i believe it's let's see i think it's the red line we need six inches right at six okay let's see if it cuts a six inch log otherwise we ruined it interesting it's fun but i feel like you have to like constantly look at where the blade is good it's just a long piece it's a huge one yeah i mean okay we're making some adjustments we've learned a little from our first log i learned that i've heard these are called i think these are log stops i they were a little tilted the environment perfect 90 degree angle so i'm getting these adjusted and i also learned that it's not as easy to cut lumber as you would think um as far as measuring and getting the most from the log we definitely wasted a little bit of usable lumber from that last log we'll cut that into firewood but like i said this is going to be a fun learning process see if we can get this one perfectly square for us and we'll cut another one oh yeah okay good job that's that's i think it's dead i'm thinking we're maybe 12 and a half [Music] [Music] hey i feel like our first cuts were a success so it's all matters they really like the colors i didn't know if that one was gonna be the right size but it is oh no he went flying he's gotta get under here right he's gotta get into those pads do i'm gonna try to screw those up first or whatever pull that board i put in there it's gonna come off okay you wanna get that second it's irrelevant really the gravel right because it's just gonna go yeah what do you mean by that like deeper into the ground i need to go your way more doesn't it yeah look at that and you're just going to adjust the little screws from there that's the plan is they are they pretty good oh how's that um you wanna go a tad bit more whoa that's like you tell me that looks good to me oh it's a bird the juneco wow i think it'd go down a little more bub up i mean it needs to go up a little more i'm sorry it's looking good we did two by fours to start with and those are from the store so there's only an inch and a half now we're only six inch blocks so it raised it up to just a way better position for you know operating the mill and just it's looking good it's a lot more level so far it's not perfect yet but we're gonna we're gonna try to get it perfect because before when we were milling i could feel kind of little little gaps from where we bolted it together it was a little bit off so we're going to try to keep loving it off i think it's going to take a while tedious job [Laughter] we finally finished the sawmill setup i think it took us a few days to get everything perfect yeah lots of hours of hard work some frustration some good times with the sawmill it's completely done and completely level since the ground we're on isn't very level we used our level and the beams that eric made and also just tried to file the track to make sure it was perfect or as close to perfect as we could get it i think i think it turned out really good it did yeah nowhere in the instructions they recommend you get as level as you can then you can go through and lightly file where the beds kind of joined together we only had to do that in two spots so i feel like that was pretty good this thing is rolling extremely smooth now should make our cutting a lot easier we have a lot of projects to do in the future with this so many that we can already think of but just one that we're gonna work on today right yeah we already have a piece of lumber we're gonna use and our chicken fencing around the coop is five feet tall the gate is only four feet tall and the chickens are jumping over it so we're gonna extend that we're gonna make a five foot chicken gate we're excited to use this in the future and show you guys all the things that we built yep let's get started look at that that's a real ah uh [Music] [Music] nice perfect looks great too

Channel: Simple Living Alaska

Views: 357,730

Rating: 4.9620123 out of 5

Keywords: off grid living, living in alaska, homestead alaska, tiny house alaska, off grid cabin, cabin in alaska, homestead off grid, tiny dry cabin, tiny cabin alaska, life in alaska, garden alaska, gardening alaska, growing food for the year, living off the land, off the grid alaska, summer in alaska, surviving alaska, norwood sawmill, woodmizer sawmill, cutting lumber, sawmill setup, off grid sawmill, sawmill cabin, norwood lm29, morwood lm30, woodmizer lt15

Id: ipUC9YRXrFY

Length: 30min 10sec (1810 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 16 2021