Mary and I had an LT40HDG35 Super. It was a 96 model so it didn’t have the faster hydraulics and or new clamping system. We have saw 2500 bf of oak dimension lumber in less than 8 hours on a good day. 1500 bf of on many days where we had average or worse logs. That’s with the two of us working the mill and edging on the mill.
I’ve got a lot of confidence that a good sawyer with good logs can run that much on that mill in a day – but you’ll have to have help to just move that much lumber, slabs, logs, etc. Any day we’ve sawn over 1000 bf of oak, we are tired little puppies. Unless you have several people helping or other support equipment, I’d think you’d be doing good to get half the advertised production as you’ll spend time moving logs, slabs, stacking lumber, etc.
Then, I know one gentleman with an older LT40HDG24 that often saws 3,000 to 5,000 bf of common lumber a day. He saws mobile and insists on having three men capable of hard work there to help.
We installed a new LT40HDE25-RA Super last January. Mary has been running it and is well up on the learning curve but could still run faster. The other day we ran 750 bf of grade red oak in 2-1/2 hours. But sawing grade tends to run slower for us as we tend to stop and examine the log face and turn more often than we would if we were sawing common lumber.
The edge will really speed things up if you have a couple of people shoving it in and pulling it out. If you have to stop sawing to edge, then I don’t think you’ll gain that much in speed. It will save a lot on band blades and be faster.
