Best Improvement Yet

[Cypress Man]

Would just like to thank Janice at Wood Mizer for suggesting to use the 1.5" x .055 x 1 1/8"  tooth space blade for sawing cypress lumber.  This blade is an animal at tearing through cypress logs at rediculously high feed rates with no deflection, rising, or wavy cuts.   This blade can only be optimized with higher HP mills.  It will give my 25hp 3 phase electric all it wants.  Its like sawing with a totally different sawmill. 
    I just placed an order with WM for a new twin blade electric edger today but there is a 5 week lead time.  Hope to get it set up soon.  Anyone have any suggestions for placement, material handling, layout, etc...   Hope this will help to streamline our operation and be a little more efficient.  Will let everyone know how it goes.

[POSTON WIDEHEAD]

Sounds like you're on a roll Cypress. Keep going...... smiley_horserider

[Brucer]

Regarding layout:

I use the dragback arm on my mill to pull slabs and flitches onto a long roller table that is directly in line with the mill. While the mill is making the next cut I clear the roller table as follows:

- There is a series of racks for different lengths of slabs on the far side of the table. I roll the slab to the appropriate rack and then push it into the rack. The shortest rack is closest to the mill because I'll have less time to deal with the slab while the mill is in the cut.

- I have a set of low horses to pile flitches on. They're located on the near side of the table, right at the beginning of the table. I simply have to turn around and lever each flitch across to the pile.

- The edger is located near the end of the flitch pile. When I collect enough flitches to make edging worthwhile, I simply slide them off the pile and directly into the edger infeed.

- The edger outfeed is beside the far end of the long roller table. My helper simply grabs the edgings and sets them on the table. When there's a small pile of edgings she pushes them back toward the mill and I push them off into the appropriate slab rack.

- As soon as my helper has dealt with the edgings, she pulls the edged board straight off the end of the edger outfeed and slides them onto another set of low horses. Meanwhile I'll have got the next flitch into position and can start feeding it into the edger.

- When the edging is done, I can go back to sawing and my helper trims the edged boards at a chop-saw station.

- Usually my finished product (timbers) gets pushed off the back end of the mill onto a homemade transfer table. When the product is lumber that doesn't need to be edged, I just drag it back onto the roller table and push it down to the end where it is slid directly onto the edger outfeed horses.

Basically everything is in a straight line, with the edger, roller table, and slab racks parallel to each other.

[bandmiller2]

Cypressguy,if you sharpen your own now try a little different hook angles and tweek to perfection.For every mill and every species theirs a best band,glad you found yours. Frank C.

[Woodchuck53]

Cypress guy are you the mill located on Hwy 1, down from the river going south?