The dealer makes the 10hr round trip drive

So after more than 3 months of floundering with no solution for the problem, the dealer made the drive out here to look at the sawmill. Before he came, he let us know that he's only available on Saturdays as he has to run his business during the week.

He hadn't called to confirm, so it was a little bit of a surprise when he called saying he was in town waiting at the gas station. I headed out to where he was to meet him and take him to the mill. He had told me on the phone that he was bringing a new mill out and we'd swap motors and I would end up with a new mill with my motor on it. If that would solve the problem, I told him that would work. If it didn't solve the problem, I wanted him to be prepared to just load up the mill and cancel the transaction and we'd get a WoodMizer.

When I showed up at the gas station, I was looking for a pickup with a mill in the back. However, that was not the case. He informed me that he had actually sold that mill since we last spoke. His intentions for the visit revolved around making a couple of adjustments and getting me lined out on properly using the mill.

Since I was more interested in having a working mill than getting one that was 3 months newer than the new mill I already had, I was hoping he was right.

We spent a lot of time shrugging and staring at the mill when he realized that it was not a procedural or adjustment fix. There was a significant amount of time on the phone with the manufacturer while we tried to figure out how to solve the problem. Eventually, the techs had us try cutting with a bunch of weight stacked on top of the mill head.

We were able to cut a little bit better, but there were still issues and they needed to talk monday with some others at the manufacturer and try to figure out the real solution. All in all, he drove 10 hours, I got up abruptly and early on a Saturday, and nothing changed with the mill.

The Part That May Stop The Shake

While testing the new sawmill, we immediately noticed that it had the same propensity to shake, just not as violently. Of course my assumption is that the more you run it shaking, the more the metal will flex and eventually it will shake just as violently.

After double checking everything and trying in vain, the dealer placed his foot on the ejection side riser post. The movement of the bottom of these posts was my "theory" on most of the headshake.

The amount of play at the bottom allows the entire head to flex as the blade grabs wood. When the flex is pulled to it's situational maximum, the blade lets go and swings back. Of course this happens a bit faster than it sounds. But, we did show that by keeping that part from moving, the head stopped shaking and actually made decent cuts.

So, I temporarily clamped angle iron to the area where the riser post and the bottom of the mill frame make an inverted T. Tomorrow morning we are going to go back out there and try to cut up the remaining logs. Instead of building some overboard solution, I just took some metal, flattened it out, drilled three holes, threw some screws in it, and have what you see in this picture.

Frustrated and Abandoned but Still Trying

Without support from Hudson or the dealer, feeling frustrated, feeling abandoned, but still needing the thing to work, we started trying our own solutions. Although we were able to eventually get the manufacturer and dealer back into the mix, we decided to tackle the leveling problem with a vengeance.

We had to find a way to take the crown out! The only way we could think of required a significant materials expense and a trip to the supply house for some serious steel. Although this is entirely uncalled for, the product should work w/o throwing extra steel at it, we saw this as the last option. However, we couldn't bring ourselves to spend the money on the type and size of steel it would take to counter the effects of the 1/4" crowned steel angle iron.

So, I hadn't messed with it in a while, so I pulled it out of the shop, took it to a family friends house, setup and tried to tinker and see if I could get it to cut. It was blatantly obvious that we were going to spend way too much trying to level the unit out in his pasture. Then it was obvious that even if we did get that part handled, that we'd be right where we started. We really needed the material to pull the crown out of the track.

It turned out that our friend had a stack of 3x4 ibeam. We loaded some up and headed back to the house to build the new track frame. Of course this project turned into a portable mill trailer by simply adding an axle and a tongue. The important part of the story is that we were not able to adjust the track and push/pull the crown out by using bolts in the 3x4 ibeam. Although we did end up with VERY straight track and the ability to move the sawmill easily, we did not solve the violent shaking problem.

Once again, in a holding pattern and wishing I'd just left the thing stacked up in the shop...

Make It Work Or Take It Away!

After a couple months of phone tag, hours on with support, UPS delivering shipments that don't solve the problem, and being walked through tearing the mill down, making adjustments, and trying everything short of sacrificing a goat, we gave up on the mill.

We contacted the dealer and the manufacturer and told them that if it wasn't going to work, that we needed it gone. At this point, we tore the whole thing down and placed it in the corner of our shop. We worked out a deal to use a mill from a family friend until we got our issues handled or purchased a WoodMizer.

We were basically told that they would make it work. Of course we were not convinced or even interested at this point. We had become accustomed to phone calls not being returned assumed that we were being ignored in the hopes that we would fade away. At this point we contacted our credit card company and started the process to reverse the charges for the mill. That is actually a great benefit when compared to just writing a check. Visa can get money back from a merchant and you can't get your bank to handle it if you paid with a check.

At this point, we did start getting phone calls returned. This would have been about three months into the process. We tried to put forth every effort to make it work. We already purchased the mill so it was in our best interested to make it work. In addition to calls getting returned, our dealer was now trying to schedule a visit to "fix" the problem. At this point, i'm still hoping that it's user error and that he'll just show up, call me an idiot, and tell me i'm doing something wrong.

Bolt it to the ground

One of the suggestions along the way was to drill holes in the concrete, install bolts, drill holes in the track, and then use nuts above and below the track to set it's height ever 2 ft. Although this sounds like the perfect way to assure level every 2 ft, it's somewhat prohibitive.

First, you have to talk yourself into drilling 8 holes into each track segment. Then you have to drill 16 holes in the concrete for each segment. After that you have to install 32 bolts in the concrete, install 32 nuts, place the track and if it lines up, install the final 32 nuts. Of course you have to level it once you get all of that done.

Since drilling holes in the shop floor is a somewhat permanent solution, you have to be pretty damned sure that you're going to be using the sawmill exactly where you drill cause it's not longer a "portable unit" anymore. So yes, we were somewhat surprised by this advice. Although we did contemplate this out of desperation, we decided against it.

Rather than bolt it down, we did want to do something to make sure that Hudson knew we were taking care of the leveling and that our base surface was not the issue. So, we utilized jetline and a laser level to determine the exact deviance between the concrete, true level, and the bottom of the tracks. We then cut our supports to 1/16th inch of that deviance based on 2 1/2 inches average.

The end result was each block was level from front to back and side to side for the full length of the track. A level base was no longer the issue. However, the crown in the track caused the track to stand higher than the base in a few places. :-(

UPS Brings The New Track!

As we patiently waited for the shipment to make it's way from New York to Oklahoma, we dreamed of a functioning sawmill. We were 5 to 7 business days away from getting started sawing straight logs. Talk about an end to a rough start. We were certainly looking forward to it in any case.

Once the track segments arrived, we unpackaged and began inspection. Although one segment was (to the naked eye) perfectly straight, the other one was as crowned as the 2 original segments. Seeing this, we were back on the phone again, wondering why they sent one straight and one crowned.

It was at this point that they started discussing what was and was not considered crowning. The track has to be out of true for more than 1/8th inch according to the warranty department. I could have told them the first track segments were within that spec. So, it turned out that they sent us another 12 foot of track that to replace the track that we received with the sawmill and was, according to them, perfectly acceptable.

Although getting $750 worth of track is a nice bonus, the fact that it didn't solve the problem in any way kinda made it useless. We now had the ability to make 21, lumber that wasn't straight while the mill shook so violently that it actually came off of the track twice.

"maybe the problem is ..."

There are obvious problems with troubleshooting a machine of this type over the telephone. Primarily, the words used to describe the problem don't always translate into the proper mental picture on the other end of the phone. Even if you think you are describing the problem perfectly, actually being able to watch the action and observe all of the details surrounding the issue are of great help.

However, the telephone was our only option. As such, we heard a lot of "it could be", "i wonder if", and "can you try ".

The first attempt was a walk through of every adjustment and alignment possible on the mill. There were obvious issues to the raising and lowering of the head, probably due to whatever caused the mill head supports to become dislocated as we pointed out when we picked the unit up. Were we not halfway through a 10 hour drive, we may have passed and ignored the "it's no problem, just put it back together right" and waited for a different unit.

Since the weld broke where the winch pulls the head up, we kinda figured there was way more stress there than was appropriate. They just told us to take it to a welder or weld it ourselves. Afterwards, they walked us through removing the posts, checking them for straightness, and putting it back together. Ultimately, that issue was never fully resolved and the unit never worked as smooth as it should have. But, we had bigger fish to fry. It still wasn't cutting straight lumber.

So, they said that since the tracks were on a level base, that something was wrong with the tracks. I pointed out that each segment was crowned, causing the joint to be lower than the middle of each track. As such, a 12ft track consisting of two 6ft segments would have three low points (ends and middle joint) and two high points (halfway between each 6ft section). Since this would cause the wheels to not be level at all 4 points for the entire track, they decided to replace the track. UPS was now in the mix and we were waiting for delivery.