After the saddening failure of his december trip, the dealer received a replacement mill and was headed back out here to swap the units and start sawing.
He was here early, having started driving about 3am, so we had a little time to handle offloading the new mill and loading up the old one.
Soon, we were cutting. Sadly, the brand new mill was still shaking, although not quite as bad as the old one. However, it was a show stopper, the new mill wasn't performing effectively.
After a few calls with the manufacturer, we started trying to see what we could make it do. At one point, the dealer put his foot on the ejection side pillar, bracing it to the bottom of the frame and limiting it's motion. As soon as he did that, the saw stopped shaking and took off cutting like there was no tomorrow.
Did we have a glimmer of hope? At this point, we had made our first successful cut. Unfortunately, there were two problems with this method.
1. Requires an extra person to do nothing more than wedge his foot against the pillar.
2. The extra person is not only standing in the ejection port (getting covered with sawdust), but is also wedging his foot next to the bland blade. If somebody were to always do that, they would probably trip at some point and end up losing a set of toes or a foot, maybe even a leg.
I came up with a couple of ways to handle this particular shake. The obvious solutions required welding a couple of pieces of angle iron similar to the top mount and throwing a bolt in there. However, I was mostly interested in a solution that didn't require drilling or welding to the mill frame. I wanted a solution that solved the problem without permanently altering the sawmill.
For that days testing, I clamped the post with the mill travel stabilizer that i built for the trailer. This worked after shimming cardboard on the pillar but only allowed the mill head to drop to about 5 or 6 inches. It did however allow us to do enough testing so that we could take information back to the manufacturer.
After the dealer left, i still needed to make cuts that were loser than 5", so i pulled it apart and put some clamps i had pa bring out.
This allowed me to bring the mill all the way down to 1.25 inches, which was our lowest cut for that particular wood. We were able to get everything cut up that was on that particular job, load the mill back into trailer form, then get it back to the house.
The final modification, which is currently in use is the two steel plates that sandwitch the offending post into place.
Regarding the verdict, i'll leave those details for the next posting.
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