Horizontal slab shaver.

[Dave Shepard]

Many years ago I saw a horizontal slab shaver for sale on Sawmill Exchange. It was a slow speed, low hp (10 hp 3 phase) setup that would have been at the end of a conveyor. I have never been able to find another, and was wondering if anyone here had heard of them. I know there are Salsco machines today, but they are very expensive and too high hp to work in my desired application. Thanks.

[rusticretreater]

I guess you mean a shaving mill for making animal bedding?

Try this.  Type shaving mill into google and get a page of results.  Then at the top of the page, click on the images link.  Voila! You get pages full of pictures of mills, new, old, on ebay, etc.

[barbender]

Jackson makes them too, but yeah most I've seen are bigger machines.

[Dave Shepard]

This was not a shaving mill in the traditional sense. The slabs fed into it like a planer. It was not a complicated machine, and was low horsepower. It looked like it would be perfect at the end of a set of rollers. Anything that wasn't a board or flitch, just let it keep going to the shaver. This would make slab disposal happen without adding any additional time to sawing, and at 10hp, would not add much cost to the operation. Product would presumably be suitable for cattle bedding. My options right now for disposal are hauling then away at around $8-900 per tri-axle load, or hiring a large chipper a couple times per year, assuming I can talk someone into doing it. Owning a chipper plus spending the time to chip would be many years of just trycking it away. Burning is not an option. 

The Salsco machines look awesome, but they are actually too productive, too expensive for my purpose, and would add probably more fuel expense than running the mill itself. I think they would make sense for a higher volume mill than what I'm running. Disposal costs are only going to go up around here.

[Magicman]

What does @Peter Drouin use?

[Dave Shepard]

I think he has a small brush chipper. He also has a market for chips, I don't. For the cost of a chipper, plus the time it would take to do the actual chipping, plus having to have a truck to haul the chips, I could pay to have them hauled away for years. Neither of those options is financially feasible. 

[melezefarmer]

Does it work like this one?

Hutto mini mill


Edit: There's also Salsco that makes a 40hp unit.