Thread: Portable mill advice

Jesus Sigidi get him get him quick. My best advice is read the small milling timber pages, Then decide how rough your country is. Petersons are quite heavy compared to a Lucas and up to an over twice the price.The lucas is lighter and easier to lug.You get excellent service from Lucas with Peterson if your state distributer is on the ball you might get really good service you might not. There are some great guys here that can fill you in on other stuff west oz mark travis and natural edge as well as bobl or great for seasoning advice while Sigidi is the man for Lucas mill advice He eat sleeps and sh@#$ lucas mills we think. And for portable mill weisyboy,natural edge and interTD9 chain saw mills try Bobl an travis and travis can put you onto a band saw miller for radiata
Natural edge might be your best bet as he s based around Wagga wagga and he cuts an dries as well

Originally Posted by Patches

G'day all,
New member looking for some advice.
Have a considerable standing timber resource: 20+ ha of P. radiata at varying stages of maturity, plus a lot of dry sclerophyll forest (mostly only firewood grade stuff, but some nice red stringybark, ribbon gum, yellow box too).

Interested in purchasing a portable mill for processing timber on site, and possibly a kiln as well.

Less than an hour to Canberra, 3 or 4 to Sydney.

Available labour: 1-4 adult males

SO...

What might be an appropriate mill/kiln setup to get started with?

I've heard great things about Peterson when it comes to cutting hardwood.

Anyone out there milling radiata commercially at this scale?

What about the Logosol portable band saw?

Cheers,

Harry

How big is your cheque book?

I do not know much about logasol band mills but I do know what woodmizers do, but at the end of the day it depends on a number of things as to what the best option will be.

honestly if you have a front end loader and all you want to cut is 2x4 or 3x6 from your pine and providing the logs are 2 ft plus in diameter, then a Mahoe mill would be hard to go past. Granted the recovery may be higher with a band mill but the throughput would more than make up for the bit you lose in kerf.

Really more info about your setup and how you plan on doing things would be needed to advise upon what would be the optimum way of achieving it. It may even be more advantageous to approach some of the larger mills and see what they will pay you for your timber.

Thanks for the plug itsposs but a chainsaw mill would definetly not be suitable for what he wants to do and honestly it would take a bloke 20 years to mill 20 hectares of pine into slabs with one let alone dimensional lumber.

check out Wood-Mizer Portable Sawmills and if you like what you see send me a PM and I will give you the details of a dealer here in victoria.

Forget peterson they are more expensive than the all aussie lucas mills and I am led to believe performance wise they are no better and am told they are harder and slower to setup.

as I say it depends on what you wish to achieve as an outcome what your market dictates and what you can afford. the market dictation is the biggest thing as it is no good cutting 90 x 45s at 2.7 long if the market requires only 6 x 4 at 3.6 long, thus you have to establish this before you even fell a tree let alone look at cutting a stick.

Hope this is helpful and should you require further assistance do not hesitate to contact me.

hey trav you mention the peterson is harder and slower to set uphave you set a peterson up i have set up both a lucas and peterson (wpf) and the wpf frame is much quicker and easier IMO yes the peterson is more expensive especially the wpf if you are going to mill a lot of logs in the one spot the hi low rails on the wpf frame is hard to beat

Originally Posted by tlbsg

hey trav you mention the peterson is harder and slower to set uphave you set a peterson up i have set up both a lucas and peterson (wpf) and the wpf frame is much quicker and easier IMO yes the peterson is more expensive especially the wpf if you are going to mill a lot of logs in the one spot the hi low rails on the wpf frame is hard to beat

As I said I am led to believe that they are slower to setup, I have been looking at what I should think about buying myself, and in discussions with people regarding the mills readily available, this is what I have been told. SO no I have not set one up, but I am led to believe that in some circumstances it can take up to 2 hours to correctly set up the WPF. You may have a different opinion to this and I am not unwilling to hear about it. I will say that the petersons do look like they use good quality materials and appear to be well made, however with what I have seen of them I personally do not think that they would be worth the extra outlay, over a lucas, for what I want to achieve. This said however it is not about what I want or need but about what patches is trying to achieve, and as I said to give any halfway decent advice he needs to look at what his desired outcome would be and what his market will dictate before any of us can give quality advice as to what would be his best option.

And yes If you have a WPF I would like to hear more about it, as In what I have seen of it I find it interesting. PM me though and I can discuss it at greater length with you.

Travis

[QUOTE=Travis Edwards;1127152]How big is your cheque book?


Thanks for the plug itsposs but a chainsaw mill would definetly not be suitable for what he wants to do and honestly it would take a bloke 20 years to mill 20 hectares of pine into slabs with one let alone dimensional lumber.

Logosol Portable Sawmill Planer Moulder 4-sider Melbourne Australia its a chainsaw mill

i can setup my Lucas in 10 mins on my own. on any terrain.

after running my lucas for few years.

This is my opinion on what would be the perfect setup if money was no opinion.

-60-100hp crawler tractor with blade and skidder for sniging.
-60hp 4wd tractor with loader (bucket and forks) for loading the mill, sawdust and flitches.
-forklift or loading packs of timber.
-boggy drive crane truck possibly 6wd.
-huge shed. concrete floor.
-#2 bench
-and a good quality multisaw.
-i would get a swing blade mill made cos as i see it none of the mils available are up to the task.

if i had to buy a mill that is off teh shelf.
for fixed site milling id go a peterson ASM with electric motor.
for mobile a 10" lucas mill.

i would not buy a twin blade mill.
i would not buy a bandsaw mill - except as an extra for resawing high value softwood.
chainsaw mills are a dead loss for commercial output.

would need to know exactyl what u plan on doing to recommend what would be best for you.

hey carl ,lucky you don't live in the hills. 10 minutes is pretty good

DONT LIVE IN THE HILLS!!!!!

obviously you havent seen where i live. iv often thaught about cutting one leg of at teh knee

i normaly have to setup accross the hill or i cant move the powerhead. i baught a side shift winder cos i couldnt push teh thing accross.

10 mins is good. normaly its 15 mins and i hae setup in 5 before. nut that ws runing i wanted to get setup b4 it stared pissing down.

Good on ya itsposs

Patches, as Travis said, it will depend upon your end goal a lot. Having said this (and I think you already may have got the hint from Itsposs) I'm gonna bang on about the need for a Lucas... anyone surprised??

Travis has a good point about producing timber with something like a Mahoe twin blade sawmill - although for the price of a Mahoe, you could purchase two Lucas mills, get more output and use the 4 adult 'workforce' you mentioned and still have spare $'s

Chainsaw based mill, I'd agree with the chainsaw mill not being the being a good production option, they are a great machine to process wide slabs into much higher value commodity, but as a 'mill' per se, I could see how they would get old very quick. Ask Weisyboy if given the option, he'd mill using one of his chainsaw mills or using his Lucas.

As compared to a Peterson (hopefully Rude might pop his head up) Rude recently worked with Weisyboy on some milling, Rude has a 10" Peterson WPF and commented to Weisyboy about how much easier and quicker it was to setup Wiesy's Lucas compared to his Peterson.

The biggest factor I think which pushes Lucas over the line is flexibility, there are so many things you can do with it, small logs, big logs, stay in one place, move around heaps, tapered logs, produce timber/beams bigger than the capacity of the saw, make slabs, finish slabs... blah blah blah and then an added bonus is for price compared to it's direct peer is much less, so it leaves you more $'s to set up your kiln or get some kind of log moving capability like a front end loader.

I'll give someone else a chance

I did see where one of the Petersen family are making a rather interesting looking monorail mill with lots of features. Don't know where I saw it but it was recently.
Just a thought.
Dennis.

yeah that's the Turbo saw Dennis, someone recently brought it up here on the forum, and it appears to be made by none other than Carl Peterson - I think the original founder/maker of Peterson sawmills? not exactly sure on that part, but am sure no the fact that Carl and his son Jake, are making the Turbo saw.

I've seen some interesting claims made about Peterson mills on this site over the last few years which I usually just read, mutter "thats not right", and carry on reading. As you can see from the amount of posts I don't have much to say but this time I feel I have to ask a question, which is, when price comparisons are made , which Peterson mill is everyone talking about. Two years ago I purchased a 8" ATM which landed in my shed cost me $17,500. An 8" Lucas at the time was $16,000 so we have a difference of about 10% which is a long way off double, even an 8" WPF would have only cost me 50% more than the Lucas but that was more than I could afford or justify. On the weight issue, yep its heavy, 80 kilos more than a Lucas and it's all in the tracks and frame although there are 10 separate components so its not like your going to carry them all at once. The mill doesn't cut any better than a Lucas which isn't surprising because they both work in the same way and although all the bolts are stainless, they are a mix of metric and imperial which can be a right pain. So why did I buy it? Its got a few features I wanted and I just like to be different.

Baron, I for one, would love it if you popped ya head up a bit more and spoke up about the things "thats not right" when stuff is said concerning Petersons.
As I've often mentioned I haven't used one and I think as you've mentioned there can't be much difference in cutting 'better' between the two, unless it's down to operator issues.

Was your model an ATS, as compared to an ATM? The one most like a Lucas in that the rails rise/lower?

But definitely pop ya head in and set things straight when you feel they need setting straight, after the forum is here for people to find out info.

Geez Allan I just went and checked and it is indeed an ATS [ all terrain sawmill] and not an ATM [automatic teller machine] but you must admit if you placed them side by side a blind man galloping past on a horse would be hard pressed to tell the difference.. As an addition to the weight thing [each track is 20 kilos more than a lucas] there is the height thing, you need to be 197 cm to comfortably use the height adjusters,I stand on a bessar block. This all makes sense when you realise this thing was built in New Zealand. Having watched Rugby of both codes it is fair to assume that all Kiwis are bloody huge and the slip in wheels we use to move the carrage around arn"t even an option over there,they just tuck the frame and tracks under one arm ,the carrage under the other and jog to the next job.