This time I'm building a circular swingblade sawmill from scratch. The function of the mill is in its name - 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 the beam end plates and both vertical and horizontal sliders.
