Live Vintage Sawing February 13, 2016

This Saturday our volunteer sawyers will be firing up the ol' sawmill and showing visitors how logs were actually milled. Below you will find out more about the process in a short video.

The sawmill itself is an American Saw Mill Machinery Company sawmill. It is a variable belt feed saw mill. Given the information provided by the mill itself (which is not much)), the sawmill seems to be from 1923-1928. During the 1920's, the American company was apparently the leading circular sawmill manufacturer. The company sold all sorts of machinery and even power devices.

In particular our mill, most likely an American No. 1 Variable Belt Feed Saw Mill, would have ran off a tractor engine. It would have needed a 10-20 hp engine. There were three other "Heacock" belt sawmill, all branded by sequential numbers. The different versions had larger carriages and other components that allowed for larger logs, which required more power.



Did you know a sawmill could be right or left handed? If the log passes to the right of the saw, then the sawmill was right handed. If it passed to the left it was left-handed. The importance of this comes from how the saw would be hammered.  Put another way, place yourself as the sawyer in the sawyer box. Determine which side of you the log carriage passes.




Missing from our setup that was common on American sawmills and on all sawmills is an "edger." The edgers were "essential for efficient sawmill operation."

The history of the circular saw is interesting in of itself. Many different people are credited with inventing the circular saw, but often left out of the tales is one the creators, a woman named Tabitha Babbitt. She created the circular saw that we know in the 1810's. Put more directly, the circular saw that became popularized in American mills was created by Tabitha.

 In Disston's wonderful book "The Saw in History," Henry, a prominent saw maker himself, credited Samuel Miller with receiving the earliest patent on a circular saw. Miller received his patent on August 5, 1777. Henry makes mention of a circular saw being used a century before the patent. In America, the first circular saw produced was done by a Benjamin Cummins in 1814. In wasn't until the 1840's insert-able teeth were created, and it wasn't until 1859, that insert-able teeth were perfected.

So many men were credited, and yet, Tabitha and the year 1810 is nowhere to be found in most early history books. What set Tabitha's creation apart from early inventions was scale, ability to be replicated, and the belief that she should not put a patent on the saw. Instead, Tabitha shared it freely. In fact, by 1813, her saw was in a mill. The key to the story is not that Tabitha created it first or who received a patent first, but that while watching men engaged in pit sawing, she developed a prototype on her spinning wheel that won over the male workers. It didn't hurt that apparently she, or those on her behalf, advocated for its use in sawmills. By the 1850's, the circular saw had been "perfected" enough to gain wide spread use. 200 years later, the same basic setup is still be used on circular saws.


Sources:
http://vintagemachinery.org/mfgindex/detail.aspx?id=36
http://vintagemachinery.org/pubs/36/5852.pdf
https://books.google.com/books?id=2ztqAAAAIAAJ&pg=PA13&dq=history+of+circular+saw&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjiiYC84-vKAhWpg4MKHer4CQEQ6AEIJDAB#v=onepage&q=circular&f=false
http://www.yorksaw.com/blog/2009/12/history-of-the-circular-saw/
http://www.womenhistoryblog.com/2016/01/first-women-inventors.html
https://books.google.com/books?id=3DI_xYBqKbwC&pg=PA184&dq=history+of+circular+saw+tabitha&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwio27DU5-vKAhVHx4MKHUuCAJYQ6AEIHDAA#v=onepage&q=history%20of%20circular%20saw%20tabitha&f=false