Wood-Mizer LT35 First Day Lessons and Mistakes To Avoid

Wood-Mizer LT35 Day One Log One Experience and the many lessons we learned.  Jason and I fire up the #Wood-MizerLT35 #portablesawmill for the first time, finding out quickly that a 4 hour course at the WoodMizer headquarters and hours of Youtube #sawmilling videos don't replace on the job experience.  We mill our first maple log into lumber and get a feel for the hydraulics, adjustments, and overall need for more hours of experience.  It's a great feeling to know we will be building all sorts of new buildings, deer blinds, and habitat management projects with the lumber from our land.   

Watch This Before Buying a Sawmill.  I talk about the importance of the buying experience and what my experience was with Wood-Mizer, Norwood, and Hudson.  This is not a competitive review of the technical aspects but the considerations that went into which brand and why and also how my decision evolved over buying full hydraulic capabilities now versus buying into an upgrade approach as offered with the Norwood HD36. 

I love my Wood-Mizer LT35 but I'm definitely learning what not to do... the hard way.  When I took the LT35HD training class at the WoodMizer headquarters in Indianapolis, IN, the customer service tech told me this mistake would be made at some point... he said "it's when, not if" and I definitely made it and then made it worse.

Leveraging the #WoodMizer LT35 #PortableSawmill to cut 250 wooden stakes that will be used to plant 250 native trees and shrubs on the #HabitatOasisProject, a reclaimed strip mine, in Southeastern Ohio.  I had the log handy and since the stakes only need to be 4' we tried a 5' log.  Still new to using the Wood-Mizer and learned during this session that small logs, under 6', are more trouble than they are worth.  The hydraulics are key to the LT35 and they were not terribly useful with the first log due to the length.

Using my new Hud-Son Uniforest 35M Forestry PTO Skidding Winch on my John Deere 2032R compact tractor to skid my first logs to be cut on the Wood-Mizer LT35 portable sawmill.  Still lots to learn, but definitely going to make retrieving logs much simpler.  I purchased my Hud-Son Uniforest  35M Forestry PTO Skidding Winch from Tom, Judy, and Mark at Brownwood Sales and Forestry Equipment in Columbus, Ohio.  Their service and support has been fantastic. Hud-son Forest Equipment imports these winches from Slovenia.