Milling your own lumber complete tutorial (Woodland mills HM126)

[Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] in this video i'm going to show you a tutorial of how to mill your own lumber with the woodland mills hm 126 or any comparable at-home sawmill i know they're all a little bit different but the the theory is pretty much the same so we have the hm 126 and a uh you know the tractor as you can see here um these are just things i've picked up along the way that make it easier you know little tips and tricks that i've learned when i first started out i looked on youtube and i saw a lot of information but no one really went fully into detail on secrets and and just beginning to end tutorials so that's what this is hope you enjoy [Music] okay so step one is getting the log on the sawmill uh you can do it a few different ways i normally don't do it that way i use the forks but i don't know i just tried it that way for some reason so basically it's got these uh bars here and there's slots for them all the way down the line when you first start out you want to use these ones at the 45 degree angle so you can turn the log and it won't catch it'll kind of help facilitate the roll movement i guess um so you get those set up they can't be too high because your your blade's going to come about right there so you got to check that because you'll destroy a blade if you don't it's happened to me a couple times but i learned pretty quick because they're 20 blades so now the next thing you're going to want to do where i do every day you know is check the oil obviously it's been sitting so it should be easy to tell looks like it's perfect i just changed the oil on it so after you check the oil it's good to check the water it uses this water tank to lubricate the blade and you mix soap in with it this here's a little indicator uh to show you what level the water is at which is pretty low so we'll add some so you take your jugs water open them up lindsay bought this really crappy organic soap which it sucks so that's why i'm using it on this it doesn't take grease off of nothing i add some doesn't take a lot the reason why i add them to these first is because when you add them just to the tank it sinks to the bottom and it kind of clogs up the whole thing and just give it a quick shake like that she's full now takes about two and a half gallons or something like that so so then the next thing you want to do is this is the blade tensioner and so you got to tighten it every time and loosen it i'm doing it one-handed here so this always gets in the way i put it up there because it's getting away and the way you tell is this thrust bearing if you look at it from the top it needs to be flush with that casing thing on there so that should do it like that pretty much ready to mill so i checked the gas earlier or yesterday before i left um so that should be good so next thing we'll start milling it's starting to rain so i'm going to put the camera under the tree now we're pretty much ready to mill i mean i now are pretty much ready to mill so i checked the gas earlier or yesterday before i left so that should be good so next thing we'll start milling it's starting to rain so i'm going to put the camera under the tree okay so the next thing is this handle here raises and lowers the entire head of the sawmill as you can see as you can see down here it corresponds to where that blade is on the log now you got to take about an eighth of the log off on each side but what i like to do because if you're just to cut it like that if you're just to cut it like that all of this is a wasted piece of wood whereas if you just cut the top off the bark then you can cut an inch slab off and then you have a usable slab down the road kind of like we've done over there i don't know if that makes sense or not obviously be easier just to make one cut and be done with it but then that piece would probably turn into firewood and it'd be unusable so what i'm gonna do is just cut off about i don't know an inch and a half to start with and then we'll be able to get a nice one by whatever slab and a usable piece so you always want to make sure this guard is as close to the log as you can without touching it um it's got these like i don't know what they're called little guides i guess that keep the blade from from waving you know it kind of helps stabilize the blade i had it i know this because i had it completely backed off and i was getting waves in the board and i was like why is that well i learned the hard way and it's because this needs to be as close as it can to the log another thing that's really important is wearing ear protection and eye protection these have like a foam thing around the outside i don't know if you could see it or not it helps keep dust out of your eyes so i wear these and also a mask which you know masks man it's about the only time i ever wear a mask is when it's uh logical is to wear a mask because there's a lot of fine dust particles from the wood which you wouldn't believe how many there are when the sun is shining boy and if you breathe that stuff the first day i didn't wear a mask and i could feel it in my lungs my lungs hurt so it's important to wear safety safety gear [Music] so the way you start it is [Music] give it a go [Music] [Music] okay so we made our first pass i turned the motor off uh because you can't really hear me over it so now what i do is i get the the blade directly where it was before and the way i could do that is just play with it and wait till you see it just barely slide on the top okay then the next thing you do is come over here and this is adjustable so you can adjust it so i'll just set it at whatever i'll just set it at whatever mark it is you know say it's on 16 or closer to 15. and i use this side so i'll just go 16. it's at the top of 16. so what i do is lower it down to the top of 15 plus another quarter crank and that's the blade thickness so now so now we're ready to mill a 1 by slab off of it and that's usable [Music] [Music] now what we have to do is unclamp it and we'll roll it 90 degrees so this side will sit flush with these guys and it's real important to do that because that sets the stage for how square our entire lumber stack is gonna of course when i'm trying to do a demonstration it fights me and everything tangles up but you get the point you loosen that you gotta wrestle with it a little bit that's the hard part and then you get that lined up with those ones so it's square that's real important cause that sets up a 90 degree angle for our next cut okay now we got a nice 90 degree angle and we're going to do the same thing we're going to rotate it 90 degrees except for this time it'll sit on its own it won't try to roll because it's not round and so it sits right in perfectly it's a little harder to rotate because it wants to catch because it's not round but you'll see so there it is sitting so then a crucial part now is you gotta really watch these because i've cut them before right now we're good um so i'm gonna cut this one square we'll flip it again and then we switch out to these smaller uh these smaller ones here that way we don't cut them we get lower on the saw [Music] all right we're square on three sides now so we're down to our final turn and then we'll be doing lumber i found it easier on this this final turn if you can slide it back a little ways it makes it a lot easier because it really wants to catch those bar guide things just like that now we'll swap out our long ones for the short ones i always keep these handy because we'll need them again this thing is to the outside it's sliding down too far but literally that's as far as you need to go because it'll hold it on its own same thing on this one pull it out all the way down yeah and at this point you really don't need to clamp it because it's heavy enough it won't move so we will need to clamp it later though okay now that we got what is called a cant this big rectangular thing is called a cant uh we're ready to start talking about lumber and there's a bunch of different ways to cut these up ah man i'm no expert when it comes to like riff saw and all sort there's a bunch of different ways you can do it and i think generally that refers to a circle sawn sawmill because it can cut different but anyways the band saw sawmill we'll basically just look at it and measure it out and see what we can get and what's most efficient with the least amount of waste so to do that basically run a tape for like 10 and 15 16 by i don't know nine and nine sixteenths so i need two by sixes so i'll probably if i cut a six inch cant here well no so if i cut a six inch cant here that'll leave me another four inches there for two by fours so i'll have two by sixes here two by fours with the rest and then we'll only have a small waist of scrap at the end so that makes more sense to do it that way so we'll turn it back over on 90 degrees we'll cut a six inch we'll cut a four inch and then we'll have a scrap piece okay basically we're gonna do the same thing we're gonna zero it out basically what that means is you put your band saw at the very top of the can and then you come over here and you put it at whatever is relevant so it could be anything it could be 12 it could be 11. i just go by inches that way it's easy so i'm at 12 i could slide it up to 11 or down to 13. we'll just call it 12. and then what i do is take the crank and i lower it down six inches there's one two oh it's a little less than six inches so we're gonna lower it down a little bit there's six inches right there so we got our six inch camp but we got to get it out of the way so that we can mill this thing down to four inches and right now it's currently at just under five inches so what we'll do is we'll slap it back down like that same thing goes we zero it out then we drop it and we measure it so we're at four inches and ready to ready to mill [Music] [Music] now what we got to do is get these guys upright uh we got to get these bars up a little higher to hold them because we're going to be cutting two inches off each one of them so so same thing we zero it out make sure that blade is just at the top like this time we're going to be taking two inches off at a time because that gives us two by fours and two by sixes so we'll center that at 11. all right now that uh a two by four and a two by six is milled uh we have to give it a good sweeping to get all these fibers out of the the grain it's real important so i'll go through and sweep these uh it won't dry right if those uh fibers are there it also makes it more susceptible to mold and mildew and whatnot so i go through one at a time and sweep the top and uh what i do next is i pick them up and uh i'll stock them over there except for i'm gonna rotate them 180 degrees so that i can sweep off the other side over there all at the same time you'll repeat that process all the way down the line ran out of gas all right so we got our two by fours and our two by six is cut the next thing we'll do is we'll sweep off the other side of them now they've got to cut we got to pack them around to the lumber yard area here's the lumberyard area i put these pieces of metal on top of them to keep the rain off yet they have to ventilate from the side so that the wood can dry out and what i what i'll do here is i'll put stickers down so i cut these i do them uh one by twos or one by inch and a half as long as the height is the same they can kind of vary on the width so i'll just start stacking our lumber nice and neat right here row by row now that we got a full stack i got this sprayer and it's filled with half water half water half vinegar and so i pump it up and spray it over the top to help keep mildew and bacteria and it's supposed to help it dry out quicker but i don't know if it does that or not next we'll go down with uh six more stickers it's important that these stickers are lined up directly above one another that way the weight holds right on on top of each other because if it's not then it'll it'll warp the boards and stuff so and we'll pack the rest of our our lumber over here that's the process just got to do that about 600 to 800 more times and then i've unlocked the opportunity to build my own house

Channel: The Off Grid Handyman

Views: 100,187

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Id: SFc--FXbZ0U

Length: 25min 39sec (1539 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 23 2021