Log Mill Tools
Log mills have been around for over 100 years in the United States and serve as the middle man between the loggers in the forest and the consumer who desires to build a house. Whether you're building a log or traditional home, you'll need a sawmill to provide you with finished lumber to complete your project. A Log mill trims rough logs into finished lumber using lifter tongs to maneuver logs into the mill, debarkers to expose the wood of the log, circular sawmills to produce lumber sticks and planers to trim that lumber into a final product.
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Lifting Tongs
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When a mill receives a shipment of logs from their army of loggers, the first step is to stack these logs until they're ready to be milled. This lifting and stacking process is done using lifting tongs. The tongs wrap around the log and pinch under the weight of the log while an operator lifts with the boom. Tongs come in 16-, 20-, 25- and 32-inch sizes and can lift upward of 3000 pounds. Along with lifting, tongs can be used to drag logs across the mill yard.
The Debarker
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When the logs are ready to begin the milling process, they're pulled from the log stacks and placed on a debarking machine. As the name would suggest, the debarked removed most of the bark off the log in preparation for the sawing and lathing processes.
The two types of debarkers are rosserhead and ring. Rosserhead debarkers use a sliding head to peel bark off the log while the log is spun by a series of toothed metal wheels underneath the log. Ring debarkers send the log through a spinning ring that shaves the bark off as the log is pull through the machine. Ring debarkers are more compact but are limited by the size of their ring. Rosserhead debarkers can take any size log as well as irregular shaped logs.
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Circular Sawmill
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The circular sawmill is the workhorse of any mill and is still the fastest and most preferred method for cutting timber into lumber -- even after over 100 years of use. The circular saw spins at several hundred or even thousands of RPM and can run perpendicular or parallel to incoming logs to serve different purposes.
When perpendicular, the operator can cut logs to a desired length or remove unusable sections of a log. Placed parallel, the circular sawmill can cut a circular log into uniform rectangle lumber pieces.
Once the rough-saw lumber has exited the circular sawmill, it will head to a planer that reduces all four sides of the lumber to a specific size while smoothing all edges to create a final product that's ready for the consumer.
Planer
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A planer works by shaving all four sides of a piece of rough-sawn lumber to a specific size using rounded snipe blades. This is a key final step in the milling process as it will smooth the lumber and trim it down from a nominal to dimensional size. For example, when we use the term "2 by 4," that is a "nominal" term for a board that is actually 1.5 inches wide by 3.5 inches tall - the result of going through the planer machine.
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References
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