Timberking - 1220 (Rating: 5)

Timberking has been selling sawmills for a long time and I've wanted my own for almost that long. It took a while to get everything together to purchase one. I went with a manual mill instead of a more expensive hydraulic model, first because of the extra expense for the more complicated sawmill. Second, I wanted to saw lumber to be used in my own products and to justify more expense, I would have had to be in a full time sawmill business. With this little mill, I can carve gunstocks and when a good log (maple, walnut or cherry) becomes available, I'll saw it, stack & sticker it, dry it and then carve it into gunstocks.
A manual mill is a lot more effort than a hydraulic assisted mill. So far I've sliced up 4 logs. One white ash, two red cedar, and one walnut. My mill has a 25 hp engine to power the saw and it cuts like a knife through butter. The saw head travels by turning a crank and down the tracks it goes. You can feel knots and slow the cut to keep the saw blade from making wavy cuts. There is another crank to raise and lower the saw head. I've only cut for about two hours, but the effort to cut a 20" log 12' long wasn't excessive at all. I bet a 34" white oak log that's 16' long will be a lot harder. I bought a harbor freight winch to load logs on the mill and I'll use it with bigger logs to roll them on the mill and to turn them. My next project will be to weld up a support stand to mount the winch on the sawmill. Cleanup was just as easy, my leaf blower got all the dry dust off the mill and a few sweeps of my broom took care of the wet dust.
The second picture here is a closeup of one of the roller guides. Timberking's baby mill uses simple bearings and they've added grease fittings to make them last longer. The third photo shows my computer setworks. Woops, manual setworks. The inch scale shows where the blade is above the deck and the three scales on the right are set up to show 1" plus kerf, 1.25" plus kerf, and 1.5" plus kerf. Or you can do some simple math in your head or make your own scale. I do miss the setworks that I used on the B-20 I ran for a year.
On the limited time I've run this mill, I'll have to say the materials and construction techniques in this sawmill are first class. The mill is strong and I hope to be sawing with it for years. I didn't get the optional trailer package because I have a good trailer that's going to be only used to transport my mill. Log handling is a huge problem right now, but I'm building a log arch this week to haul logs from my woodlot. I'd recommend Timberking to anyone looking to make their own lumber.