The Timber Technologies Story

In 1984, my wife and I began looking for a portable sawmill to buy. We had a good-sized woodlot, and wanted to harvest some of the timber, without clear-cutting or building roads into the forest. We also didn't have much money to spend. We investigated just about every type of small sawmill on the market, and here's what we found:

Portable sawmills come in two types:

1. Large, high-capacity, very expensive movable mills: you use a tractor to skid the logs out of the forest to the mill
2. Cheap, slow, inaccurate, and dangerous-looking hand-carried models

What a disappointment.

After a lengthy search, we decided that there must be an alternative. Armed with backgrounds in machine building, woodworking, aircraft design, and forest management, we set out to make our own sawmill. At first, our wish list of features seemed impossible to achieve. Here's what we wanted:

• We wanted a sawmill that a single person could operate, including loading the logs. My brother-in-law's not much help in the woods.
• The mill needed to be lightweight, but strong and super-durable.
• Easy, fast set-up was key: it gets cold in the woods, and we didn't want to waste time fiddling with something complicated.
• It needed to be safe. We wanted something that even my brother-in-law could use.
• Since we didn't want to wreck the forest getting the logs out (or the sawmill in), we needed it to be small enough to fit in the back of a small pickup (and to live in a corner of the basement when we weren't using it).
• We have some pretty big trees, and so we wanted a capacity of at least 30" in diameter. We also didn't want a limit on log length capacity.
• Most importantly, the mill had to be affordable.

As you might imagine, many of our early efforts ended up at the metal recyclers.

We tried band saws, circular saws, and chainsaws, and here's what we found:

Band saws make a nice smooth cut, but are very slow, and we used up so many blades that we abandoned this idea pretty quickly. The added frustration of having to sharpen 1,000 teeth, accurately (!), was not what we considered easy-to-use.

Circular sawmills are quick and easy to use, but to make them go you need some serious horsepower, which translates to bulk, weight, and expense. We found no way to make a functional sawmill based on a circular saw for under $8,000! Plus even if we could afford one like this, they're so big and heavy that you normally set them up at the edge of the forest, and use a tractor to skid the logs out to the saw. We didn't want to do this because of the damage it caused to the forest.

Eventually we tried various chainsaw-based solutions. Most of these were simply attachments for your chainsaw. They were cheap, and light, but slow, and because they were attachments to the chainsaw engine, not very accurate. We found that a lot of hand alignment and careful set-up were necessary to produce even a small amount of lumber. We had some pretty good ideas for improving on the attachment idea, but eventually realized that it was a dead end: we wanted a sawmill, not an attachment for our chainsaw.

Back to the drawing board. We were going to have to get creative.

We ended up buying two of the largest chainsaw motors we could find. We had an Australian company create a double-ended chainsaw bar.We redesigned the the cutting chain, welded together an ingenious track system, mounted a carriage on it, and Holy Cow! we had everything we wanted!

The system that we finally came up with is fast, lightweight, safe to use (notice how far the operator stays from the business part of things), truly portable, easily maintained and sharpened, and best of all, cost us less than $4,000 to build. We were able to harvest some of the timber in our forest, turning it quickly into free lumber, without damage to the forest.

We sold one to a neighbor, and pretty soon lots of people started asking us about them. Over the years, we have stuck to the basic design idea, but made it easier to use, faster, and less expensive to purchase and operate.

Our company is founded on a very simple set of principles: we produce high-quality, truly portable, easily-maintained sawmills that are affordable. You can look at current specifications and prices here.

We appreciate your interest in our machines, and hope that you'll contact us if we can answer any questions or mail you a brochure.

Thanks!

Fred Gore
President
Timber Technologies, Inc.

3774 Bleak House Road Earlysville, VA 22936 (804) 978-4636
email: ninon@mindspring.com