Thinking of getting conveyor and transfer table for LT70

[Cypress Man]

Hi everyone,
Now that Im getting more familiar with operating the LT70 DCS controls, Im thinking of getting the conveyor and transfer table to make things a little easier and safer for my offbearer at the edger. Does anyone actually use these and what advise would you give about it. Pros and cons. Will it work in a 90 ft long building? Just triing to get some real world advice before jumping into it.

Thanks
Chad

[Dave Shepard]

I don't have personal experience with them, buy anything you can do to get the material away from the mill without killing your offbearer is important. If the transfer table is like the one in the WM movie from about ten years ago, you can have it automatically dump slabs or cants of one side, and boards the other. It also has a little bit of surge area so you can keep sawing while the edgerman catches up.

[backwoods sawyer]

A local LT300 running that setup claimed he had the smallest building woodmizer had set one up in, I am guessing but seems like 40x60. The more room you have the better, make sure you have accssess to both sides of the mill, he did not. (three man operation)
Another mill just down the road is running an LT-70 with that set up just under a roof with open sides, having accsess to all sides gave him lots more options for sorting (two man operation)

[stavebuyer]

I have both and they are probably worth the money if you have the help and run the mill every day. We have our sawyer in a cab with the saw head cutting towards him. It's a much clearer view and speeds him up. The out-feed conveyor runs faster than the drag-back and does keep everything out of the way and probably gets 95% of the slabs without every needing to be touched. Slabs from crooked logs or logs with a lot of flare or taper sometimes come off sideways, or stand on end especially with short logs. If you don't already have the log deck package and an external hydraulic pack I would spend the money on them first.

We have the DCS remote. We added the log deck, out-feed conveyor, transfer table, laser, and an external hydraulic power pack.

In order of production benefit;
1a External hydraulics
1b Log deck
out-feed conveyor
Transfer table
Laser

I'd call the external hydraulic pack and log deck a tie. No way I would have hired help and try run the mill without them. The out-feed conveyor is nice and works well but does add a lot of length. The edger man is further from the mill but that isn't always an advantage as we sometimes have to wait for him to walk back to handle a slab that doesn't come off the drag-back correctly. For our setup everything except boards to be edged comes off to the kicker side of the transfer table. The guys quit using the laser and the air kicker on the transfer table after the novelty wore off. Either they or the switches always seemed to be in different place when needed to switch between manual and auto mode. Our building is open to the south and west. The laser sight isn't visible in our setup much after daybreak.