Just thought this photograph might be of interest to anyone interested in old saw mills and old woodwork machinery .......

Found in the May 2015 edition of the German language Holzwerken (Woodworks) Magazine.

There is an article in the magazine about the "Holzhandwerksmuseum" (Wooden Crafts Museum) at Hiddenhausen, Germany. The museum's web site is at http://www.holzhandwerksmuseum-hiddenhausen.de/ but it's in German, so you'll need to feed it through Google Translate (translate.google.com) if you want to have a read. The following photograph in the magazine article caught my eye. It appears to be a reciprocating band saw. My German reading ability is very basic, so I use Google Translate to translate the articles for me. Unfortunately I can't tell you too much about the saw as the article contains too many technical engineering terms which Google Translate can't handle very well.

Best I can work out from the article, the entire workshop that this saw lives in is powered by a steam engine, and the machines are driven by line shafting. There's a small number of photos on the Museum's web site showing some of the other machines.

After seeing this photograph, it struck me that if a person was going to build their own small saw mill, then maybe a reciprocating type saw would be a simpler machine to home build.

The German text in the photograph translates roughly to "The horizontal operating mill saw from 1895 is the Flagship of the Hand Work Museum. The know-how for the operation of the machine is passed from helper to helper." (I was unable to find a translation for the word "Sagegatter". The phrase "mill saw" is about a close as I can get, and makes sense in this context. If any fluent German speaker can improve my translation, or provide more details from the web site, I'd appreciate it.)

Screenshot from 2015-05-14 17:46:38.jpg

Anyway, it's an interesting saw. Enjoy.

Regards,

RoyG