Sawmill

I remember reading that you and Will purchased a sawmill. My husband and I are wondering what brand and model you purchased.

Robin Novotny
Ironton, Minnesota

We bought a Hud-Son 121, which cuts a 21-inch log however long you buy or make rails for. We really love our sawmill and we paid roughly $3,000 for it. Will “flat-sided” log floor joists for the new barn and front porch rafters. We’ve cut boards and lumber for our training ring barn, tons of one-inch lumber for siding and the floor of our new barn’s haymow, 2″x6″ lumber for the new barn’s framing where the board and batten siding will go, and lots more odd jobs for ourselves. Will has also done minimal sawing for friends. He cut one-inch birch boards for someone in trade for the huge bus frame on wheels that he turned into a big hay transport that will haul 10-11 big round bales. The sawmill has been a VERY good buy and we’re not done, by far! — Jackie

Movable goat pens

A while back you mentioned that you folks had movable goat pens so that they could be pushed back to the walls so that Will could run the tractor through the barn to muck it out. This sounds wonderful and time and labor saving. Where could we get those plans or could you share how this was done?

Brad & Rhona Barrie
Strong, Maine

What we’ve done so far is to weld stock panels to the lighter weight livestock pipe gates. These are hinged and can easily be swung out of the way for manure removal with the tractor or other equipment. We also plan on having some plywood available to bolt on to these in case we want to keep certain pens warmer during kidding. We also plan on having more than one set of screw-in hinges for these gates to set on so if the manure pack gets too deep we can just lift the gates up a few inches and set them on the alternate pins. This keeps gates from being “manured” in as the deep litter gets too deep. We are also going to use this method on the front of the pens, using a narrower gate as the walk-in gate with a longer gate as the main front of the stalls. These, also, can be swung or even lifted completely away for quick, easy cleaning of the barn, come spring. — Jackie

4 COMMENTS

  2. Ken,

    Maybe not a book, but probably an article, for sure. Briefly, we chose the Hud-Son because it was A. cheaper and B. gave more bang for the buck than others. We knew that because we couldn’t afford a more expensive brand/model that we’d have to do some manual labor while sawing. It would be nice to have a lot more bells and whistles such as a hydraulic loader or bigger log capacity, we just learned to work around ours. Will uses the tractor bucket to load big logs and if they’re too big to fit in the mill, he slabs the sides off with the chainsaw.
    We’ve found that having SHARP blades makes all the difference in the cutting. When the boards start to get a bit “wavy” it’s time to switch out the blades. Keeping those logs clean in the first place is a huge MUST. If there’s any gravel or dirt on the logs or in the bark, you get dull blades right off the bat.
    We often only slab off the top of the cant and then cut boards of varying widths, bark on. Then we can trim on the table saw, each board to the best size, saving a lot of wood that way. Yes, it’s more work than sawing up a squared cant, but we get more lumber out of each log that way.

    Hope this helps out some.

  3. I would love to hear how you chose this one. Why do you like this model, what would you have done differently?

    How did you learn to use it?

    What tips and tricks make you successful cutting the boards you need.

    Possibly another book topic?
    Thx, Ken

  4. Have you seen the spiral Wire Panel Connector Hinge at premier1 supplies.com? I use those for a lot of different things around my Nubians and they are a lifesaver!

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