Woodland Mills HM122 Sawmill Review

hey everyone so today i'm going to do a review of my woodland mills hm122 sawmill i've had this mill for four months now and i've i've been want to do review for a while uh just so happens today we got a bunch of snow followed by a bunch of rain and i i really can't do anything else out there today so this was a good day to do a quick review and and saw some wood so let me flip the camera around and we'll get started okay so here's the mill this is the hm 122 nine and a half horsepower model and i got it with a track extension and that lets me saw logs up to about 17 feet which is good because i do a lot of 16 foot lumber um overall i've been extremely happy with this mill i i've in the past i've done a lot of milling with wood miser mills trailer mounted mills and those have always been great but when i started shop around for a mill for myself woodland mills really jumped to the top of the list for a lot of reasons the thing i like about them the best i think is the value you get an exceptionally good mill for much less money than the other brands and and i think that's that stands out as probably the strongest thing uh to me now this mill i've mounted this on a timber frame and it puts the rails at about 29 inches off the ground and i find that to be very comfortable working height and again i was used to using trailer mounted wood visors and they're up at about the same height and so um when i came time to to put these rails together and mount everything i i wanted to elevate them up on a stand and that's just a very comfortable height to work with there's no bending over my back never gets sore and so that's worked out really well let me do a quick walk around at the mill and we'll start inside here in the inside the bandwheel compartment one of the things uh i really like about woodland mills is they give you an a nice metal band wheel compartment some of the other brands have gone to plastic compartments and you know they try and say well you know it's better if you throw a blade it's not going to tear up the blade and and cause damage i'm like yeah well you end up tearing up your enclosure in some cases you still might tear up a blade and just in my overall experience song for many years if you get your mill dialed in and set right you should not be throwing a blade it should be very rare so i still prefer an all metal cabinet and they've done a really good job making a nice solid welded up metal cabinet very high high quality inside it's a pretty standard setup you know you've got a drive wheel over here this is your engine power shaft with a centrifugal clutch that drives a belt that turns that drive wheel and the belt also acts basically as the running surface for the blade around that drive wheel there's a tension adjustment here that's really really easy to just to use if you want to tighten up that belt and the belt does loosen up a little bit after it's initial use so it's good to re-tension that and check it periodically over here we've got the follower wheel it's got a urethane belt insert inside of it the 122 comes with fixed blade guides you can you can optionally add a movable blade guide on this side if you want to move it in now i found it's really not necessary at all these are hardened steel guides and then in the back which you can't see from here but we'll look at later there's actually a ball bearing back there to help if you if you push too hard or the blade wants to deflect a little bit that bearing is going to catch it and keep the blade inside those guides and then over here we have the lubricant injection system i use windshield washer fluid during the winter this is a real nice system probably the the best thing about this system is that woodland mills at no extra cost includes an automatic blade lubrication system it immediately starts dripping the lubricant when you throttle up the engine then shuts it off afterwards some of the other brands some of the higher priced brands they'll ding you a couple hundred dollars if you want automatic clay lubrication so it's very nice to see that come standard on this lower priced mill and this is the valve right here this is the throttle cable when you throttle up the engine it ends up pulling this little flapper opens up that valve and then your lubricant flows down and comes out right there and so that's a really good system and and it's nice to see it come standard on the mill the other main thing i want to talk about in here is the sawdust ejection port i have never had this clog and i saw a lot of sappy southern yellow pine i've never had that clog up clogging is a common issue on many of the other mill brands some of the ones with those plastic enclosures all they have down there is a couple holes and it's just it's kind of stupid but this has a pretty nice big uh sawdust ejection port it works very very well in my experience i mean you can see there's there's a ton of sawdust over here it just fans it out a good eight feet and also dumps it straight down so that works uh very nicely and we can come around back here this is the throttle lever to hand grip and i have this this push handle and throttle bar oriented this way if you had the mill down on the ground you'd actually have it flipped up the other way but this works very well very comfortable to use over here we're looking at the tracking and tension system for the follower wheel this is the tracking adjustment and i needed to make a very small tweak to mine it's very easy to do and then this is the tension adjustment which you you set your attention by uh turning this t-handle until this this bushing right here becomes flush with the housing and then there's a stack of bevel disk washers inside of there and when you bring that into that proper depth the tension is basically automatically set for you they have a real nice system where tracking and tension are independent of each other and so you do not have to retract this thing every time you change a blade and retention it that said tracking and tension are related in the sense that when you set your tracking it's going to basically be set for whatever tension you had dialed in at that time and so as things change you know maybe temperature changes maybe the the blade stretches maybe the belt stretches and and things change you'll probably never get that perfect relationship between tension and tracking that you had that very first time you set your tracking and so what i found and this works great is i'll come out here before him about the saw and i will tension up the blade and then i'll come around over here and i'll give that follower wheel uh five to ten spins and watch watch the blade as it goes around and just make sure that it's staying put where it's supposed to be if it's not what i've found is that a very slight uh tweak to that tension adjustment and i'm talking about an eighth or a quarter of a turn in one direction or another is usually enough to get me back into that zone where tension and tracking are you know one to one the way they were when you set the mill up uh initially and so yes tension and tracking are mechanically independent but they're still tied together physically and you you probably always will want to do a little teeny adjustment to that tension to get your tracking dialed in uh the final amount but i've never had i've thought i've had this for four months i i've lost track of how many boards or board feet i've sawed i have never had the blade jump off i've never had any issues at all it's been just very reliable and that's great because um some bandsaw mills um they they are just not reliable they're or they're fussy or they're touchy or they're they they're not repeatable they never you know you can't set them the same way twice uh this one has been just super dependable so so that's been good up here is the lubricant tank by the way that's a welded aluminum tank and it's got a flow rate valve right here it's a very nice setup coming around back again this is the winch used to set the height of the bandsaw head on the track it's a very simple system when i first saw it was like boy this looks kind of simple and kind of basic but boy does it work great i it's very accurate there's a turnbuckle adjuster right here that you can use to level the the saw head and once you get it set up boy it it works surprisingly well i i have to admit i'm i'm really impressed how some such a simple winch system works so well this is the metal bar where you can put your magnetic lure scales i tend to use the true scale here this these are true one-inch increments and then i'll snap on additional scales these are magnetic rulers you can get these on amazon for three for three for nine dollars or something very very inexpensive and uh i'll use that to set up custom markings for custom increments and for instance what i have here now has one and five-eighth increments and i'll chase these marks down when i want to saw two by lumber uh that gives me a nice rough sawn two-by and uh makes it real easy to follow those marks and of course you can add other magnetic scales for for any increments you want here's that kohler nine and a half horsepower command pro and this has been very good very reliable starts easy i've run it in all temperatures basically between say 20 degrees fahrenheit and maybe about 70 degrees fahrenheit and it's worked great in all those conditions the only thing i do not like about this and i think this is a really dumb design on kohler's part is for some reason they decided they had to put the choke and the spark on off and this is also a fuel on off valve and the pull handle all within four inches of each other and you know i i don't get it it's just it's just stupid i could see these two being to get close together i mean that that's that makes sense this should not be here and you know you have to be really careful when you pull it and start it and you let the cord recoil back in that you're not going to whack these handles because they could break them and i've heard reports of people doing that now i've studied this and i think i could actually take off these three bolts and rotate this recoil start cover down to put the pull start coming out basically down here or you could flip it and make it pull out to that side and i may do that at some point you know you won't see kohler it's going to be crooked it won't be horizontal anymore but i think that would be a quick and easy fix to get this out of the way because that's just way too crowded and it's kind of silly um back up a little bit the frame for the trolley it's it's it's a six or eight pieces that bolt together but it is exceptionally rigid and actually the good thing about it is if something's not perfectly square or you know maybe seasonally you get temperature swings and the metal changes a little bit you can come loosen up all those bolts and just basically give it a jiggle and it'll settle back in and you re-tighten them up and it's just super super rigid so um for a frame that comes in a box in multiple pieces boy i am impressed with with the way it comes together and it's just a very good mechanical design very good frame my mill shipped with the older bushing design that that they've been using for many years and i really haven't had any problems with these but they have come up with an updated bushing design and they they send out free parts to anybody who who asks for them and uh i may put those in it at some point they're supposed to reduce uh some of the jiggle i don't have a whole lot and frankly i like to have this loose enough so that when i raise raise the head the saw head or lower it that it doesn't bind but the new bushings are supposed to cut down on the jiggle and basically give you a tighter fit without without causing binding so i'll probably put those on it at some point um i guess the only other thing i want to talk about is just two quick modifications i made the first thing i did was i put some scrap plastic hose on the end of these stops so that when the saw head comes back it doesn't make such a loud thwack metal on metal which i just i'm a mechanical engineer i don't like to hear metal on metal so these these dampen that and and that was a real easy fix and i did that on both ends of the track then the other thing i added was a rope that i can loop around here and and hook under those stops and you know that's really mainly if we get a windy day i don't want and i used to put a cover on this and i'll grill cover i don't want this thing sailing down the track the other thing i found is when i'm fueling up the motor it's real handy to be able to tie the trolley down so it doesn't slide out on me while i'm holding a heavy gas can so those are two little modifications that have worked out very well so that's sort of my quick uh not so quick it's been 15 minutes i guess overview of the mill what i'd like to do now is uh um button it up and uh saw some lumber and what i have here is about a 10 to 12 inch diameter southern yellow pine log about 14 feet long and i need to get some two by eights out of this for a project so let me set things up and then we'll do a little bit of sawing so before i saw i'm going to go quickly through my what i call my pre-flight checklist where i tension up the blade and check everything make sure we're good to go okay here's where i like to come in and give this a bunch of spins and keep an eye on the blade see what it's doing and i can i can feel back here with my finger and i know where it's supposed to be and it's it's real good it's right on the money now but this is a good time to check everything just make sure there are no problems with the belt with any of the the pulleys uh with the guides i do adjust those periodically but i haven't had to adjust those for a while so those should be good but looks like we're in good shape here the blade is tracking nice and true and so we're ready to saw one thing i want to add about this i've seen a couple other reviews of very sawmills where people complain hey you know the first time i throttled this thing up the blade jumped off uh you should not be finding that out when you throttle up the engine you should be finding that out when you do your pre-flight check on the saw among many other things there's so many common problems people have with sawmills that really could be avoided or debugged if they just took a few minutes to just check everything over rotate that wheel watch the blade make sure everything's working before you power up so [Music] so [Music] so so [Applause] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Applause] [Music] uh so so so so [Music] [Applause] [Applause] so [Applause] [Applause] team so [Applause] [Applause] [Applause] [Applause] so [Applause] all right i wanted to stop here for the video because it kind of gets repetitive from this point out but this is basically the procedure i would use to take a pine log and work it down the two by lumber here i was after two by eights and these are a true uh eight inch wide sometimes i saw dimensional sometimes i saw true in this case i want a true eight inch wide it makes a beautiful 2x8 and what i'll do is i'll probably be able to get uh four very nice two by eights out of this particular log and then the first and the last uh cuts i'll put those back on the mill and edge them and i'll be able to get two nice two by sixes out of those so uh that's not a bad deal to get uh four two by eight and two two by six is fourteen feet long uh out of a piece of southern yellow pine uh like that anyways that's the end of my review uh i hope this has been useful and thank you for watching so so so

Channel: Lumber Jack

Views: 520,474

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Id: faPCBVQSrcA

Length: 38min 22sec (2302 seconds)

Published: Sun Jan 31 2021