Mighty Mite band mill

[ozarkgem]

Anyone else have one besides me?

[NMFP]

We have one at the school I teach at.  Very heavy machine and heavy built.

One disadvantage is that its not very user friendly, especially for teaching kids to saw for the first time. 

Nice thing is we can saw up to 27' material on it.

[ozarkgem]

We have one at the school I teach at.  Very heavy machine and heavy built.

One disadvantage is that its not very user friendly, especially for teaching kids to saw for the first time. 

Nice thing is we can saw up to 27' material on it.

not sure what you mean by not user friendly. I found the manual dogging system to be a PITA so I converted them to hydraulic. Mine just had hydraulic head and travel. Might me the bottom end model. Pretty simple. But I have not ran any other bandmills either

[NMFP]

The model we have has a selector switch for controlling the hydraulic circuits.  Its a lot of pushing and pulling the selector switch for operating the head or the log deck.  Not a big deal but something else to have to worry about especially with teaching kids how to saw.

Another issue is the dual log turners are spaced too far apart to effectively saw 8-10' material so its really based to saw long material.  Another issue is the taper feature is on the wrong end of the mill, meaning the toe board is at the far end so when you load logs, you would need to load the small end away from you.  The other issue that's major is dogging the logs and cants.  A center dog spike tends to push the log or cant out of square if dogged too hard.  Its a good entry level machine but it is almost 20 years old... Its an Early generation of mills and they have really come a long way since then.

[ozarkgem]

mine doesn't have all that on it. My dual log turners depend on which cant hook I'm going to use

[NMFP]

Feel fortunate.  For the money, I feel there are much better mills out there than the band mill we have.  We only use it for teaching thin kerf production...other than that, everything gets sawn in the building on the edminston mill.  There is where the production is.

[LaserZX]

Anyone else have one besides me?