Sawing Sycamore With a Norwood Portable Sawmill

Reader Contribution by Dave Boyt
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Big Sawmill Jobs

All right, I’ll admit it. My sixty year old body just doesn’t do things as easily as it did twenty years ago. Problem is, my brain doesn’t always seem to get the message. I can look at a job and say to myself, “yes, I remembering lifting, shoving, riding, driving, or fixing something like that, so I’m sure I can do it again.” Usually by the end of the day, my brain catches up to what my body has been trying to tell it. This phenomenon is especially evident when I’m running the sawmill. The manual sawmill requires me to do all the lifting and log turning by hand, though I often enlist the aid of “Henry”, my 1953 8N Ford tractor. I have also installed a winch, which helps tremendously.

Meeting the Customer

While demonstrating the Norwood sawmill at the Mother Earth News Fair in Lawrence, KS last fall (great show, by the way), I noticed a fellow watching as I cut one board after another from a fair-sized oak log. After introducing himself as Doug, I learned that he had some fair-sized sycamore trees on his property that had fallen, and he wondered whether I would be willing to come over and take a look to see whether I could saw them up. What I didn’t realize at the time was that “fair-sized” meant up to six feet diameter and forty feet tall! Once again, my brain kicked in without consulting my body. “Sure, I can mill those.” Truth is, I’ve never been beaten by a log, but I’ve never worked on anything this size.

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