Cutting rounds to lengths

[Conor Wright]

49 minutes ago, Will76 said:

I;ve been looking at those. I didn't realise you could stick a large hardwood round through them.

 

Which one do you have? Have you used it to cut rounds?

They're not really set up for it, but it wouldn't take much adapting I guess, all I have is an lt15 but I sliced a few rings for table tops before, about 500 across, so not exactly "big" rounds.

I just wedged it against the cross member and stuck a plank behind it, screwed them together and kept my foot on the plank to steady the piece. Certainly not a viable way of producing firewood. It was a case of getting two or three pieces off each round at about 8 cm, I reckoned the mill should be more accurate than the saw so I gave it a go, maybe theres potential for it to work for you. 

If you made up a "box" to sit into the frame of the mill and slid in the rounds, arranging them securely against each other, then run the mill down the rails. The theory works, not so sure of the practise. Also I'm not sure how the blades would cope cutting endgrain all the time.

I'd rather be stood at the processor pulling levers.

[Will76]

I was thinking more something like a HR115 Horizontal Resaw. But with a chainsaw not a bandsaw. 

 

 

[monkeybusiness]

48 minutes ago, Will76 said:

I was thinking more something like a HR115 Horizontal Resaw. But with a chainsaw not a bandsaw. 

 

 

All you need (in theory) is a conveyor belt and a chainsaw, and a bit of refining. Still going to end up with a lot of waste/handling though.

[Bustergasket]

I know someone who wrecked a stenner 52 sawmill cutting rings, he nearly killed him self in the process, i saw the ring that was retrieved from a nearby field and it looked like the blade had cut in about 1/3 then the ring rotated, essentially giving more to the blade it the spun and was ejected, mate said it went 30 ft in the air, appreciate new bandsaw blades are not as coarse on the blade, but i would guess it important to get them well anchored down, i have used a large BGU 3 phase 12 inch diameter cut 9kw tilting saw to do what you are proposing and the drop into splitta, it’s possible you could use woodcutta but you would have to set each ring, i would suspect that if you had a woodcutta you would just buy in the timber, it’s very fast, automatic and i would suspect the labour saving and higher output would make the numbers stack up, provided you have a requirement for large volumes, the splitta will take anything that fits, this is what i was feeding through yesterday
if you had a 2 ft length then woodcutta will deal with easy it would just be the single rings that needed a few inch off would take a bit of time, i sell the a grade woodcutta cut from cord at the normal price, if someone is more sensitive to price offer them the more varied arb stuff, just fed through the splitta, arb stuff is hard, cord is much easier, spent most of yesterday collecting an oak stem which has about 7 cube, reality is if i stayed and processed cord i would have done 30 cube [emoji106]

[Dbikeguy]

Wouldn’t you split it then cut to length on a decent sized chop or table saw?
Sure i saw someone splitting 1m lengths then cutting in 4 somewhere. looked pretty easy and fast, the splitter seems to be the slow bit

[benedmonds]

On 25/05/2020 at 08:30, Dbikeguy said:

Wouldn’t you split it then cut to length on a decent sized chop or table saw?
Sure i saw someone splitting 1m lengths then cutting in 4 somewhere. looked pretty easy and fast, the splitter seems to be the slow bit

This is how we deal with arb waste, but it is not really worth doing, especially now as the price of the wood for biomass keeps going up.. What with the 20% moisture content requirement I can't see small scale firewood production being commercial viable in the coming years.

s