I'm building a circular sawmill from scratch. The function of the mill is in its name "Swingblade" - the blade swings 90 degrees making it possible to cut both ways while moving the carriage up and down the log resulting in dimensional lumber in one pass. I built a chainsaw mill ten years ago and milled lumber that I used for my cabin / sauna house project. Then I built a bandsaw mill five years ago and used the cut lumber to build a partition in my barn I currently call my workshop. Both of them worked great, bandsaw mill was faster than chainsaw mill for sure. But I think I can make an even faster mill and swingblade sawmill in my opinion is just what I'm looking for. There are different types of swingblade sawmills, one type utilizes a railway system where the saw carriage rides on rails so both rails are in the way when loading the logs. I want to build a beam-type mill where the saw carriage is suspended on a beam over the log that sits on a couple of wedges so it doesn't roll off while cutting. There will be no need to clamp the log down. Cut depth and width adjustments are all going to be made on the sawmill beam end frames. And to top it off - it will basically be a portable sawmill due to its build properties but I think it's only going to sit in my yard regardless of the portability.

In this video I'm fabricating a 7 m / 23 ft long truss beam from scratch. I'm using 20x20mm rectangular tube as rails and 8mm rebar as crossbars and diagonals. I start by setting up a 160 mm / 6.29" round tube as a something to tension the 20x20 tubes against for welding, sort of a backbone of the whole project. Otherwise the rails will end up wavy and the sawmill will cut inaccurately. Then the rectangular tubes are tightened and rebar cut to needed lengths. I then tack weld on the cross members both on horizontal and vertical surfaces. And as a last operation I add diagonals. Everything is tacked together. Now I only need to heat up the weld areas before welding to avoid deformation caused by heat shrinkage. Preheating should lessen the effects of that. But we'll see. The overall weight of the beam should be around 38 kg-s according to the calculations. Once the beam is all welded it'll be a whole different story taking it apart - meaning: getting the 160mm tube out of the beam. It'll get tight, no doubt. But we'll manage! Wish me luck! And enjoy the video of course! Cheers!

This sawmill build is based on www.turbosawmill.com "Manual Mill" design and it is patent pending.

Swingblade sawmill build series:    • Swingblade Sawmill Build  
My other videos: https://www.youtube.com/DonnDIY/videos
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Welding equipment borrowed from Spetselektroodi AS, Estonia:
Fronius TransSteel 2700 welder
Optrel Crystal 2.0 Welding Helmet
Hypertherm Powermax 45 XP plasma cutter