Shake Shake, It Happened To Them!

Our Hud-Son Oscar 228 Sawmill was previously deemed as a mystery.  The shake we have was not seen before.  We had been informed that they test every milll before sending it out.  In their testing, they FINALLY had a unit act like ours.

I was excited to hear that they were finally exposed to the problem first hand.  I was anxious to hear what the solution would be.  Unfortunatly, it was something that I refer to as "tinkering".

In previous posts, I've referred to this mill as something that we've been able to cut with, as long as we've been willing to spend a considerable amount of time "tinkering".  There are a few different things that typically happen during "tinker time".

1. raise the mill head all the way up. loosen the bolts that hold the stabilizer tube. slide each tube down until they are snug on the bottom of the frame.  Tighten the bolts.

2. clean and lubricate the stabilizer tubes

3. use a wire brush to clean out the wheels on the eject side and remove wet sawdust from the eject side of the mill tracks.

4. recheck blade tension and blade guide alignment.

5, if the ground is wet or a parucularly heavy log has been dogged up, recheck track straightness.

Since installing the "shake fix" brackets at the bottom, we do not have to constantly adjust the tube and bring it back down to the bottom of the track.  The sandwitching plates hold it where it needs to be.  In fact, in cases where it starts to shake, backing the upper screw off the stabilizer tube seems to soften it up.

Still looking for a solution that allows us to start the mill in the morning and cut all day w/o using tools for anything other than changing blades.  If we could make Tinker Time a thing of the past, we'd be headed down the right path!

Another Cutting Project

This weekends cutting project was

 somewhat simple.  Mostly 3"x10" boards.  I needed about 25 of them 8' long and 10 of them 16' long.  All in all, 35 boards.  Should be a peice of cake.

an 8' long 3"x10" is about 20 board feet

a 16' long 3"x10" is about 40 board feet

25 of the 8' boards is 500 board feet

10 of the 16' boards is 400 board feet

Add this up, and it's basicly 900 board feet

From what i've been told, this could be accomplished on a sawmill such as the Oscar 228 in a single day with no problem.  I'd have to dig through my notes, but something says the number was supposed to be around 1200 board feet per day.

In any case, I began preparing the mill.  It's a little quirky so you have to give it a once over.  I assume this to be true about most mills.  The only thing that starts and runs prefectly is my RedMax chainsaw :-)

Once I started cutting, the real confusion began.  One cut would be perfect, no shake, rock solid, as if the mill were functioning as advertised.  However, lower the cut heigh 5/4 and there would be a couple places in the same unturned log that caused a violent shake.

I cut small logs (under 18" in diameter) and large logs (16ft x 28") with similarly inconsistant results.  To my suprise, the largest log cut with a higher consistancy than the smaller ones.  This log was too big to fit on the mill w/o trimming on three sides with a chainsaw.  This alone was 

considerable work.  On the initial dogging, the log only touched the tracks in 2 places.  I was afraid this would cause some sort of instability with the mill.  However, there were no problems.

  This log was obviously too large to turn with cant hooks, so we had to use the winch truck to assist in turning.  In the end, we found that we were unable to completely cut the log up w/o the shaking coming and going through the process.

At one point, I was faced with redicule from the people watching.  When the mill starts jumping around, I basicly have to climb on top of it, and try to stabilize it for that particular cut.  The description was: "looks like a monkey f**king a football".

My response: "It feels like a monkey f**king ME with a football".

Still wondering what if anything can be done to make this a usefull machine/tool instead of device that, with enough tinkering and wrestling, can be wrangled into making a couple of decent cuts...