Why Portable Band Saw Mills Are Not for Everyone - The Numbers Surprised Me

hey everybody welcome to the video welcome to the channel my name is mike and today we're starting on a new project let's start taking some of the logs we've got drug up here throw them on to my friends woodland mills hm122 and start working through our cut list for the new chicken coop slash goat barn so that's what we're working on good news is i've got all the mess cleaned up from when we did the timber bridge project now we're cleaned up from the timber bridge project this should give us plenty of room to kind of lay everything out we're going to try to mill all the posts all the structure and all the exciting as well ourselves that's kind of the goal we recently did a pond builder pond expansion repaired a pond that we built the first time we built it it didn't go very well but the second time so far so good we'll go down take a look at it later on in the video we have had some rain anyway we had to clear several trees during that pond build and we're going to be using those trees from that pond build to uh to mill up so i mentioned this was not our mill it is actually our friend clint's mill he was nice enough to let us borrow this for a couple months and the whole purpose to this is we've been researching entry level mills like a woodland mills hm122 or wood mizer lx25 for some time now and it all revolves around cost savings for the property and then of course lumber prices went absolutely insane and we started digging into that research a little bit more so the whole purpose is we want to find out will we actually save money if we have a mill is it worth the investment and worth the time or should we just go to the local sawmill and buy our hardwood that way with that being said this video covers two weekends and two weeks worth of evenings trying to get as much milled up as possible and what i learned pretty quickly is there's a lot more to milling than just milling there is an immense amount of time in setting up and realigning and making sure everything's ready to go to get good even straight boards now obviously this is a pretty temporary setup on some cross members i've laid down and if you had a more permanent setup there'd be less time in this but i did have to go through pretty frequently about every three logs and readjust the feet on this that is all lined up and ready to go next thing i want to do is get my water tank ready and make sure we're going there and there's there's a couple things i'm not super fond of on this mill setup and this is one of and i'll show you what i'm talking about get you a little closer maybe so this is so this is the vent tube obviously water comes down runs through here now this is kind of a cool system the water only flows when you pull the throttle this little paddle switch whatever you want to call this little linkage is attached to the throttle so when you run the throttle in theory the water's supposed to come out see how it's not well it turns out it's a vent issue with this vent pipe i'll show you what i'm talking about now don't don't just don't make fun of me too hard here [Laughter] i got the cap off so it'll flow out of here can you see all the sawdust and stuff that comes out with it there went some big chunks when the vent pipe is up it sits like this and just not a lot but enough sawdust falls down in here that it clogs up this elbow and the tank can't vent and then your water won't flow be a simple fix you could put it up here maybe put a 90 on it or something like that maybe even i don't know can you loop a vent over like that and still work effectively anyway i'm going to get that cleaned out so it'll actually flow right and then we'll get to going in there that comes out i need do i need to take this whole thing off i wonder there's so much gunk in there it won't even free flow out but the tank lid is off it can the water can't even get out it's crazy so hopefully we got her cleaned out enough now she'll see the water coming out on the blade right there this blade's not in great shape but we're gonna run it get the bark get a cant turned with it at least before we trash it but now when i hit that switch water should come out there it goes way better than what it was doing okay so real life mike was pretty caught up on that being a vent for the watering system and even for the whole two weeks i kept thinking that after going through and looking at this after editing i'm realizing that's probably just a sight glass so you know how much water is actually in the tank regardless of what his purpose is it still had the same problem it would collect that sawdust it would clog up that line or that valve and it would slow down the water going to the saw now that doesn't seem like a big problem problem but that is the lubricating system for that saw blade and if you're not lubricating your saw blades well your saw blades don't last as long and saw blades which we'll talk about later in the video are pretty daggone expensive not to mention the downtime every time i had to take that apart and clean it to make sure the system was working properly a little bit later in the video we're going to talk about the price or the cost per board foot and board foot is a one foot by one foot square one inch thick it is pretty much the standard unit of measurement when talking price in the timber industry we'll talk about that a little bit later on and it'll give us a good idea of what it would have cost had we gone to purchase all this timber instead of milling it ourselves but before we get to that we have to talk about the cost of the equipment itself like i said this is an hm 122 and when he purchased it he got it with a bed extension and it cost him right around 3 400 shipped to his door so we'll go ahead and throw that up on the board there so we have that tally now there's other expenses as well obviously chainsaw comes in pretty handy but since we and i would assume most homesteads already have one i'm not going to include that in the running tally but if you don't have one obviously it's something you're going to need to consider so [Music] so [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] so out of this first log we ended up with 74 board feet of timber this is how much we have to recoup still so this is what we ended up without that one log i have six one by twelves there so that's six foot of siding and i ended up with three of these four by fours and they turned out pretty nice they're all pretty consistent i'm pretty happy with them how are you oh you got a bunch of burrs on your nose there bud there you go better got the orange collars on it's hunting season the main thing i'm trying to get at each log is the four by fours and then any siding i get out of that log that's just kind of a bonus i'm keeping track of it whenever we get down to it whatever else we need then we'll just cut regular cans and cut siding out of those cans this blade's getting pretty close to needing replace putting a new one on there but since we're getting ready to put a new cant on and that log does have a little bit of mud on it we'll go ahead and run this old blade see if we can't get the cant turned first and then put a fresh blade on i have seen where guys will pressure wash the logs before they mill them and that's a pretty good idea but we don't have we don't have water over here at the barn so we can't really do that we'll just go ahead and use this older blade get the nasty stuff off and then when we get down to clean camp we'll put a new blade on [Music] foreign [Music] i think as a part of morning maintenance or startup maintenance you just need to take this off every morning and maybe stick air nozzle in there and blow it out and clean that out make sure that line's all clear we seem to have her tuned in okay now i mean it's a sawmill sawdust is kind of part of the operation [Music] so let's talk the cost of blades real quick now i purchased my blades from woodland mills themselves on their website i bought two boxes of five so 10 blades total and this is how much it cost i just did a screenshot to show you guys but whenever i did that they also charged a 100 flat rate shipping fee which seemed a bit outrageous at the time had i done some research though i would realize that there are lots of places you can get re-sharpen blades for less money or on wood miser's page their blades that fit the woodland mills 122 are less expensive as well now i've never used them so i can't speak to their quality or that type of thing but they were certainly less expensive you add that to the running tally of how much this operation is costing now we have that much more to recoup later in the video though we'll talk about sharpeners for bandsaw blades and how that can save a little bit of money as well at this point in time we now have 133 board feet of timber eleven feet i need some nine foot stuff and she just she's got a big old bud on her let's just cut let's cut a foot off we'll cut this big butt off and then we'll see if we can get nine foot wide maybe we can at least get one four by four out of this it's worth mentioning obviously these are all different species and i've said that before and say it again later in the video but i did not go through and figure out the board footage of each type of species that just doesn't make sense unless i plan on selling this i'm not going to spend the time doing that i'm getting these numbers based on if i would have taken my trailer up to the sawmill and said load me up with this amount of board footage this amount of timber that i need for a barn how much would i pay that place per board foot for the timber i was gonna buy obviously this is some type of hickory it would probably go a little bit more per board foot but we're basing this off of if i had to spend the money to actually buy it now if you're gonna mill this stuff up and sell it obviously these numbers aren't going to apply to you you can recoup some of this for selling the timber but we're not selling this we're building a barn out of it hopefully that'll kind of make sense oh [Music] well that's not great a wing still having cut around somehow i don't know we'll get on the mill i don't even think this log is going to be worth my time to even try to get some siding out of we'll just leave this one lay for now [Music] i was gonna try to get some of my eight foot four by fours out of this one but it's rotten right there just like the other one was obviously same same cut i'm going to cut a couple feet i'm going to cut like to here if i cut from here over and it's good i can use the rest of that for siding and we'll use it there if it's still rotten into here i don't think i can use any of it [Music] it definitely has a rotten spot there but this is still pretty good wood i said we put it on the middle and see if we can't maybe cut around and get a little bit of get a little bit of siding out of it almost set flooring that's not what we're making one thing i did try was to use my little cordless saw to clean up the bark where i was going to make each cut to try to make these bandsaw blades last so you can see where the rod is right here here's my plan i'm just going to come down like this until i get into this rock once we get into this we'll flip it over and i'll start running this way until we get into that rock try to get as much as we can maybe i don't get crazy grab one there no no not there these at least though so i cut the most that i could out of that log but it did have quite a bit of rot in it i ended up just rolling it up on its side like this and then just cutting these out for stickers trying to limit waste as much as possible later on in the video i do end up because of where we're getting the logs from later we'll go down to the pond to get them which means i'm driving past the house i do end up driving past the house and using the pressure washer and start to pressure wash logs off at that point in time and i did definitely notice a difference as far as longevity of the bandsaw blade goes with getting through the bark and cutting through less mud i did my best to go out and measure take my cut list down and try to pre-plan each log the best that i could to try to maximize the amount of timber i could get out of each cant now also keep in mind i don't really know what i'm doing here i'm just kind of measuring these and guessing the best that i can but it seemed to work all right another expense is a way to move the logs from the woods to the mill now there are hundreds and hundreds of youtube videos with homemade log arches and homemade log winches and all kinds of contraptions well this contraption is mine it's an old pipe dolly turned into a log arch and an old jeep frame that i turned into a log winch now i made this to pull dead trees out of the woods for firewood i didn't really make it for milling purposes but it's made for moving logs and that's what we need for the mill so it works perfect if it's something light like this for firewood and i don't care to drag it through the mud i'll just hook it to the winch and pull it that way but if it's a little bit heavier log that the tractor can't pull or i want to keep it up out of the mud then i'll use a log arch it gets it off the ground for me it makes it easier for the tractor to move so [Music] foreign and if the log is big enough i'll use the winch to actually disconnect the log arch as well so that i don't do silly things like this not my smartest move but it got the job done nonetheless now this fabricating doesn't add a huge amount of expense most of the stuff for me was free or scrap or given to me but it does add an immense amount of time it adds on to that time factor more time spent doing something that's not actually milling now once it's done it's done so you have that going for you and i did make a couple small modifications during this video one of them was i always had a hard time getting that chain under the back side of the log so i welded a piece of rebar onto the chain so i could shove that underneath the log and then go around pull the rebar and pull the chain underneath it actually works surprisingly well not a welder by any means in fact i'm just kind of learning how to stick weld but there you go that's what you got this time around so we got one more log down which gave us another four by four and some more the nine foot siding for the taller ends this is actually after i got done doing the bush hogging for mike in the trail maintenance so we got to get the wapa choppa off and the log winch back on and i bought some more accessories for the log winch and then we'll go get another one and see how far that gets us i did say i want to mount a toolbox right here i got one i say i got one i mean i had this one laying around the basement so that's what we're gonna use ammo cans or metal things probably work better but this is what i have which means it fits the budget i spent enough money on the hooks and stuff for the chain sections that i picked up as well [Music] that's my fingers [Music] so i picked up another snatch block or change of direction whatever you want to call it now i got two of those in there clevis can stay in there short section chain with a chain hook and open j-hook like that with a slip j-hook type style and chain hook on one end and we've got this set up right here and you'll see exactly how i use this and this little fella and there should be enough room we can easily tuck a tow strap in as well now i'm not worried about latching this if it latches look at that it does i'll probably just drill a bunch of holes in the bottom to be honest and uh if she gets wet she gets wet okay i will say though after all the modifications and after purchasing all the chain attachments and the snatch blocks and everything i need i do absolutely love it even with the wireless remote as well it makes it so easy it takes me probably less than three or four minutes to get a good sized log on that tractor look how happy i am that's amazing this is only a john deere 755 which is a 24 compact utility tractor and we're pulling some pretty good sized timber in a pretty controlled manner [Music] so it's the following morning and we're getting ready to change that to another blade and we're still on the discussion of is it really worth it i think it's going to come down to how you value your time but so we have a good metric on how much time it actually takes let's start the clock and let's try this it is on my broken phone screen it's 9 52 right now we're going to take the tractor we're going to go get a log bring it up here we're gonna mill it up see how many board feet we get out of that log milled and we'll see how long that actually takes it takes us i'm gonna include putting the new blade on because that's kind of part of milling and here a little bit we're gonna see if we can rig up our chainsaw sharpener to sharpen a few blades because i bought 10 blades and we're getting ready put our last one on and we'll talk about the cost of blades here in just a minute too i'm sure editing mike will take care of us on that all right time's ticking let's go let's see what this takes editing mike certainly will he will remind you we already talked about the price of blades but we have yet to talk about the price of blade sharpeners and we will later on because i am going to try to rig up that little harbor freight chainsaw sharpener to sharpen the blades on the bandsaws i don't know why that's so difficult site but you guys get the idea this is a popular log by the way it was the only popular log i had down like i said everything else was hickories and oaks and in the world of hardwoods poplars are actually pretty daggone soft and they cut up they mill up pretty quickly when it was all said and done when we got this on the mill we got everything cut down i was able to quite a bit of siding out of it i didn't cut any 4x4 posts out of the poplar i just cut nothing but siding out of it and we ended up with around 162 board feet take that times the price that we'd have to pay if we were going to buy a board foot of poplar this is how much that would have been worth take it off our total running tab you guys get the idea we still got a little ways to go you can see though look how much that poplar pulls when you cut it and i know that has to do with my sawing technique i'm just 100 convinced of that but it's always interesting to watch in these time lapse the way the log reacts during the cut so it's 244 now and i lost my microphone again it'll turn up it always seems to turn up take about an hour out of that for total milling time i sold my little pull behind finish mower and you know just kind of got talking to the guy got them loaded up and that kind of thing so take about an hour out of that but that's how long it took to mill up those two logs and at the very end we'll tally up had we went and bought that what it would have cost and then kind of divide our whole time by that and see what the per hour would be so we have those hard numbers because i think that's going to be the biggest debate with somebody the internal debate is what is your time worth i think that's going to be the deal breaker of whether or not it's actually worth it to have a million million on timber another thing you definitely have to consider as far as cost of milling is blades let's go over here and talk about that so i ended up with this super fancy and technical setup with two five gallon buckets of hydraulic oil an old rough cut piece of timber and then a harbor freight chicago electric chainsaw chain sharpener that i took some pieces off so it would just ride down through the guardrails it took some time it took a little bit of practice and some research on youtube but eventually i got the hang of it and we'll put it on the bandsaw mill and we'll try it out so i got time for one cut real quick i already cut two sides off with the old blade trying to get this cant turned for three more four by fours and we've got the homemade sharpened blade on there let's test it let's see what happens now pretty much every manufacturer of bandsaw mills makes their own version of a bandsaw blade sharpener as well they are fairly expensive but after looking at the cost that we paid for the blades probably worth the investment if you plan on having the mill for any length of time according to woodland mills on their website their blades can be sharpened up to five times well it doesn't take long to see that if you do plan on keeping it for several years which i would think most of us would a blade sharpener would add up in some savings pretty quickly now luckily for us there's actually a guy in the county we live in that resharpens blades actually just down the road from clint so all the blades that i ended up using i sent home with clint so he can go have resharpened so definitely was not as fast as a factory sharpened blade but pretty good even plain cut and this is hickory which sells pretty hard it definitely has more noise chatter marks whatever you want to call it than a factory blade and that's probably because we're not going to the exact same pitch every time we're just kind of rigging up a chicago electric chainsaw sharpener do the job but it definitely cut better than a used blade and just because i had a few things left over after i cut all the big logs down from the lake i decided to go ahead and try some of these smaller pieces i was just curious if it felt like it was worth my time or not and actually ended up with some decent boards out of these and when i say i tried some short logs i tried some short logs i think this next one if real life mike would get out of the way for just a second here you got her down there looks good nice job this one this one was 43 inches long but i'll probably use some of these boards whenever we build the 12 by 24 chicken coop slash goat bar there's no doubt about it so this is what we ended up with i want to start this off with a huge thanks to clint if you want to go check out his channel which has absolutely nothing to do with saw million it is him and his son working on cars it's called cb yodas hop over there and tell him thanks for letting us borrow the mill put a link in the description i also want to thank logger wade link in the description for logger wage channel as well he answered a bunch of texts and phone calls and gave me a crash course in lumber pricing it's a thousand times more complicated than i ever thought it would be and i have a lot to learn as far as that aspect goes we ended up with about 500 board feet of timber i got all the four by fours and about three quarters worth of the siding done which means we'll end up going out to longer ways at some points in the future whenever we're building the barn to buy the rest of the siding so we can get that experience as well and kind of have both sides of the story here as far as is a sawmill worth it for our homestead i don't think it is if you've got a lot of projects coming up and you can get enough timber mill that you're going to recoup that money obviously makes sense if you have a lot of timber that you can mill up and you can sell to try to recoup some of that money obviously that makes sense for us we have the barn coming up and the shelter house and i just don't see a need on our homestead to have our own bandsaw mill what i do see need for is to get back to work on the youtube yacht this is what it looks like from the sky if you guys ever wondered luckily youtube revenues been doing okay and we will be pouring that concrete floor very very soon probably within the next week or so which i'm very excited about also here's a little fly over the pond and i know we could fly over the trees to get down to the pond but you know how i am with drones i like to go through the trees i think it's more fun and then we'll hit the river now if you want more information on the actual woodland mills hm 122 i'm going to do a full on review video of that as well i did a review video on it before clint ended up taking the sawmill back and i'll have hopefully have that posted either this week or later next week it'll be way more in depth on the actual mill itself how it works things to look out for things i like things i don't like that type of thing and of course some stuff come for der perfect as well see through the trees no problem at all pond is looking great filling up a little bit at a time we haven't really had a lot of rain but it's filling up nice of course bell tower looking great sitting there as well i hope you guys are enjoying the channel i hope this video made sense [Music] i don't know i feel like i had more to that thought but i really don't i do appreciate you guys watching i really truly do mean that we do have some more partnerships coming up soon in the next few weeks keep in mind those partnerships help pay for a lot of this content that we do specifically the youtube yacht so we can get back working on that as always thanks for watching and we'll catch on the next one [Music] you

Channel: Captain Kleeman

Views: 161,105

Keywords: captain, kleeman, logging, log arch, micro logging, log winch, homemade, woodland mills, woodmizer, norwood saw mill, portable bandsaw mill, the best band saw mill, are band saw mills worth it, how much does a bandsaw mill cost, HM122, LX25, LX55, LT15, HM130, price of lumber, what is, how to, DIY, board foot, make my own timber, barn build, homestead, home owner, property owner, Before You Buy a Portable Sawmill | Things I Wish I Knew About Sawing Logs (Updated), frontier sawmills, wood

Id: VcMbdBcE0no

Length: 33min 41sec (2021 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 18 2021