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Wood-Mizer MillThere are lots of jokes about things you can just stare at for hours without really engaging your brain. Cat videos come to mind and dozens of television programs, but I’m talking about repetitive motion activities. The fireplace video at Christmas time, the Indy 500 (sorry fans), and when it comes to woodworking it’s a well-tuned handplane taking shavings off the edge of a board. Whispy, thin perfect shavings. But if you want to up the scale a bit, I think it has to be wood being sliced off a log on a sawmill. Just like with the handplane it’s oddly satisfying to just watch the planks trimmed away and the log become smaller and smaller.

It’s that time in our Milling Your Own Lumber video series … we get to cut some wood! Logan Wells walks through the process of plain sawing or live through-and-through sawing. He gives us tips on how to identify defects in the log, position the log on the bed, determine the opening face, how to operate the sawmill, and how to decide when to turn the log while sawing. And we get to watch lumber peel off a log … satisfying!

Click on the video below to watch this episode, or if you missed the first episode, click here to go to our website page where we’ll post each of the episodes every week. Enjoy this week’s video, and join us next week when we’ll look at some cool methods for taking the edge off — of lumber, that is!

– David Thiel

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