Saw Mill and Barn Building

[Carriage House Farm]

We were starting to get off topic on a woodenware thread, so I figure I'd place all the stuff here.

We have a 16 year old Woodmizer LT40 that we purchased used (it was a relatively new model at the time).   



Its paid for itself 8 fold just in what we use it for around the farm.  Last year I lost track of the number of board feet we cut for our new barn:



Inside and Outside...with the exception of the load bearing members and pressure treated stuff all off our mill.



Simple board and baton design which allows you to use green wood right off the mill.  As it dried it gaps.  Unfortunately now that we have the entire barn up with have about 50 battons that need to be replaced because of twisting a sever cupping.  No big deal really.  But interesting none the less.  All stall boards are put up green, thus they gap providing excellent stall ventilation. All the front stall stuff, like the ash and oak for the doors and rungs was cut and dried a year earlier.

Here is some cutting I did last week and I probably cut about twice that and some Walnut 5/4 early this week before the snow started flying.  I love wood.

This is all ash and Elm for interior pole barn construction.

[randydrivesabus]

i would love to own a mill....so many trees around here. the siding on my house was milled from pines on my land....i cut them down and a guy came and sawed them with his woodmizer. i then did board and batten siding after the pine air dried for a year. i still got cupping and twisting boards but only on the south side of the house. o...i hadn't planned for it to air dry for a year but by time I got to it there it was.
have fun.

[asprince]

I too LOVE wood. My brother and I are contractors. We specialize in restoring and remodeling old houses. We have a nice planer/molder but a sawmill would be a nice complement to our business. We recycle a lot of old heart pine. Beautiful wood from old growth trees from the past. We also have a truck load of red cedar logs that we salvaged from a cemetery a few years ago when a small tornado came thru and knocked down lots of 100 year old cedars. The city was cutting them and hauling them to the landfill. What a waste! We rescued what we could with the equipment we had at the time.

Steve     

[Frantz]

Wow! That barn is beautiful. Great work.. I would love something like that out here, but lumber is so expensive out here in UT. Not as many trees around here as you guys seem to have thats for sure. Again amazing work. Something to be proud of for sure. Not to many people build them like that anymore. (Built to last)..

[Understudy]

That is gorgeous work.

Sincerely,
Brendhan

[Carriage House Farm]

Thanks folks.  We joke around about how we learn with each barn we build.  This one is the third.  Because we never have enough time between crops to work on a project straight through, this building took about a year and half.

Yesterday, with the break in cold weather (70 degrees!!!), we replaced some battens, a couple boards and finally getting around to putting up that last strip of trim that runs right under the roof line (last piece about to be nailed up in the photo).