LumberJONZ milling day out

lumberJONZ ( LumberJocks of New Zealand ) – ok, a small contingent anyway – got together for some fun with my new mill, a Peterson ATS swingmill portable sawmill. On a fine winter day, we hitched up the mill tucked into a 7×5 trailer and set it up around a short section of Paulownia on a small farm just outside Christchurch. The tree had been felled a couple of years earlier and mainly what was left was a short section off of the stump and a single trunk section. This was our first milling experience and it was good tree to start with. Nothing too valuable, relatively soft and light and pretty odd shaped so there was lots of practice trimming edges.

I’ll be making the permanent transition out of the city and out to the country, close to my forest block in about 5 weeks, so I’m going to become quite intimate with this mill. My hope is to generate a bit of income with portable milling other people’s logs as well as my own – and hopefully snag a lot of nice lumber in the meantime for my own woodworking projects.

The Paulownia trunk didn’t yield many boards but we did manage at least to produce a nice slab in the end for the log owners ( since this was practice and playing, no money changed hands and we left all the wood for the owner).

That’s me having a go at it.

Peterson ATS (All Terrain Saw ) portable sawmill. Here I am just about to flip the lever to put the circular saw in the vertical position for the return trip back, which then cuts the edge of the board

Paulownia slab just before the final cut off of the top. On a swingmill ( without a slabber attachment), a slab is cut by cutting off the top, flipping over, then cutting off the top again until the slab remains.

Fellow LJ Moshe ( Moshel )

-- Steve, New Zealand, www.steveracz.com