Itasca Sawmill Part 2

We continue our private tour of the historic two-story Julius Neils Reddy Sawmill that has been restored and reconstructed at Lake Itasca, Minnesota. This is believed to be one of the only working band-sawmills in the country that has a shotgun feed carriage operated with a steam cylinder.

[slhasebroock]

What a gem of Sawmill History! Thank you for sharing! Hope to see more like this!

[scotsmanofnewengland]

Living in New England I am proud to say John Deere was born in Vermont. Thanks for the video.

[tylerlelm]

This is absolutely awesome im glad somebody saved this beautiful machinery from mother nature and documented it all as well

[bob-the-Millwright]

We still run them every day, updated a little. At the mill work at we have two head rigs a left and a right and a horizontal resaw, one head rig and the resaw are high strain. On a normal day we change saws every 4 hours, on a bad day we can go thru 6-8 saws per shift per saw, Our filers just love it. Also to note while benching the saw blade you are also controlling where what we call the tires are in the blade tension and that the back of the blade is actually longer than the front where the teeth are, if you were to cut the blade into half and lay it on the floor they are not straight but lay in a big radius 45' for our bands. there Swedged teeth and Stellite teeth and frost notches for sawing frozen logs. I may have benched many bandsaws but the old timers are the true Masters of the trade!

[sion]

Running blades in pairs is not a bad way to go, you can keep them both in very close comparison with each other and so minimize grinder adjustments between the two, when you sharpen them both and they then come off the saw you can sharpen them in reverse order so the grinder is then already in correct adjustment for that saw.