How flat does your bandmill cut through knots?

[spencerhenry]

it sounds like alot of people with alot of experience have weighed in on this already, but i will add my experiences, who knows.
 i cut only standing dead. mostly engelman spruce, some blue spruce, some lodgepole pine, and some doug fir. i was having fits last winter with big logs. i was cutting some 8X18 and with 20 or 23" of blade in the log, the knots really screwed me up. slowing down the feed helped some, a SHARP blade helped the most, but it never went away. i adjusted everything, and tried several blades. 13 degree .055 1.5" blades helped, but when the logs froze, they were just as bad. come to find out that alot of the problelms i had were due to the logs being only partially frozen. once they froze up solid, it was almost gone.

[MrMoo]

Thought I'd weight in on this again. Saturday we sawed up 2 large white pine logs 26 & 28" diamter at the small end. We got 610 bf out of them. I used the same blade that 2 weeks earlier I had used on a spruce log. In the spruce it didn't cut well but I still used it & got 250 bf but had some wavy cuts. In the pine the blade cut great although at the end when we were edging it was getting to be time for it to come off.

[4x4American]

This is a good thread I'm digging up, lots of good info buried in this forum..

[Magicman]

Just remember that in 12 years much progress and many changes and improvements have been made in both sawmills and blades.

[4x4American]

Just remember that in 12 years much progress and many changes and improvements have been made in both sawmills and blades.

Good point, lots of things are a changin'..now girls can become guys and guys can become girls and guys can call themselves girls and girls can call themselves guys, and smuckers developed a way to spread jam without a knife.


On a serious note, as some much more smarter people have said, the blades have come as far as the mills have.  I've noticed on the newer profiled blades they seem to have deeper gullets for more sawdust carrying capacity I reckon and that 4 degree hook angle can saw when other blades just won't.  And I really like the lucky 7s.