Crazy DIY Radial Arm Saw Lumber Mill скачать в хорошем качестве

Crazy DIY Radial Arm Saw Lumber Mill

I have some dead ash trees in the back yard which the dastardly Emerald Ash Borer bugs killed off over the last few years. After I chainsawed a few down and cut them into firewood, it dawned on me that this wood might make excellent lumber for various projects and such. I tried ripping one of the logs into a reasonable facsimile of milled lumber, but I don't have "the touch" (check out some Russian fellow's vid on doing just that - it's really cool!) Instead, I ground the rivets off an old bedframe to make some rails so I could mount an old Sears Craftsman radial arm saw motor and carriage in order to be able to slide it along and slice up logs. Well, one thing led to another, as DIY projects always seem to go... After I'd figured out a reasonably decent way to affix the rails so that they were equidistant and supported by a surplus pressure treated 2x10 board (from a backyard rink which hasn't seen service due to pleasantly warm winters and a declining commitment to developing skating skills), I discovered that the motor's carriage bearings slipped off the rails after about 2 feet of travel away from either end. The rails weren't stiff enough. So I made a series of wooden spacer blocks capitalizing on the fact that the thickness of the rail iron was almost exactly the thickness of my Unisaw's blade kerf! Cool! A bit of glueing and screwing went on and the saw head no longer crashed to the ground! But boy, did it ever sag in the middle... And it swayed around a lot. Not good. Enter the top bracing rail: another 2x10, complete with some screwed in steel brackets and some countersunk 3.5" #10 wood screws. That stiffened the thing up nicely. However, positioning the "work" remained a challenge. Just supporting this Frankenstein on two saw horses and manually positioning a log underneath allowed for almost no ability to position things so I could make well-aligned, straight, repeatable and progressively deeper cuts. The motor didn't have the juice in it to be able to rip out a full 4 inch cut all in one pass, as proven by the circuit breaker trips. (Note to file: put a sharper blade on and get a thicker extension cord, or reconfigure the motor to run on 220 Vac.) So I made two end-supports out of two more 2x10's and a few 2x4 scraps. I can lower or raise the saw support rail by inserting wood blocks of various thicknesses at each end, pulling out the spacer blocks to lower the blade a suitable amount for each subsequent pass. I still have some work to do to make sure the log gets positioned properly so that subsequent cuts will be parallel, but that's not going to be difficult. Several clamps hold this rig together for stability, and I'm OK with leaving it that way, but I plan to make some sort of safety guard so that blade doesn't wing off someone's arm or foot by mistake. Also, I might try a larger blade if the 5/8-inch arbor will fit so I can make a deeper cut. Of course, the trade-off will be having to make more passes because the motor won't be able to drive a larger blade as easily. Lastly, I need to figure out a way to flip the log so I can cut from other angles. But all in all, this was a lot of fun!