South Island Road show, New Zealand

KiwiJake · November 26, 2003, 09:34:35 PM

Well I've finally been able to get these pictures ready, I ended up flying back while the other guys went further down to Gore (right at the bottom of New Zealand).

I ended up leaving the digital camera's base with them, explaining why it took me so long to get the pics here. I've just got pictures of the Blenhem and Christchurch shows, Christchurch is such a cool place, It's got a cathedral in the centre of the city.

We ended up taking a trailer down fitting an automatic mill, all terrain mill and production frame on it (it was a big trailer). Blenhem was the smallest show I've been to, managed to get a alot of video shots with one of us operating and stacking on the Automatic mill though. We really had to keep from sawing to preserve our logs the length of the show, it's hard when theres not many people to talk to and there's a sawmill in front of you to play with.

The Christchurch show was well worth it, around 100 000 people attend over a three day period (not many compared to what you can get at the shows overseas I bet). Anyway, our logs that we were given were the ugliest things I'd ever seen (Macrocarpa). They had humps and knots all over them, skinny at one end and fat at the other, one of our mill owners supplied them so it was pretty much luck of the draw for us.

WE HAD THE COMPETITION LAUGHING AT OUR LOGS >:(. Truck and two trailer loads of the stuff. Walking up to our site all you could hear is the ASM sporaticly growning as it ate up all the knots through the logs. It made for a good demo in the competitions yard as their logs were clean as a whistle.

I guess for the knowledgable it did make our mill look pretty sweet as it showed that it could cut anything, especially when we were getting into some amazing tension cutting 8x4 sleepers, alot of the time we had to take our 8" cuts in two bites to allow for the log compressing on the blade. All and all we got some amazing timber, its amazing what kind of recovery you can get from logs that could be considered junk.

Bellow are some pics of the trailer with three mills heading toward Christchurch, the 13hp ATS mill with some big slabs we cut, some of the timber we got, misc. pics of the automatic mill and the show.

I'll still get around to posting the diagrams of stress relief on a swinger soon. PS hope theres not too many pics.
Chears.

Fla._Deadheader · November 27, 2003, 05:19:26 AM

Nice pics, Jake. The wide cant, was it cut with a circle blade, or slabber?
Them logs look just like Eastern Red Cedar, here in the states, if it grows in a fairly open area. ;D