Well last Saturday I was finally able to make some sawdust. Its a rather long saga as to why it was so late in the year but here goes.
Back in late April I serviced my sawmill. You know oil change etc. Once I did that I mounted a blade & turned the bandwheels to determine the tracking. That's when I heard a creaking sound coming from the area of the shaft that goes to the driven bandwheel. Eventually I figured out it was in a box that contains 2 roller bearings. I even called my brother in law to get his opinion.
At that point I called Logmaster at first they told me to check everything else because they have never had a problem with this bearing box. I got back to them and said its definitely in this box. They had already contacted the manufacterer of the box Zero Max. Zero Max agreed to replace it given it only 120 hours on it. They wanted the defective part back though so they could figure out what went wrong.
Logmaster got the new assembly out to me along with some intructions on setting the tracking back up once the part was replaced.
I read the directions and had some concerns so I called them and expressed my concerns.They said not to worry I could always call with questions. I told them I would be doing this on the weekend and so they gave me their cell phone numbers and said call ANY time we will be there for you.
Well my brother in law and I swapped out the part assembly (shaft & bearing box). Then we had to get things set back up. I ended making a couple of calls on that weekend.
Around that we started to get rain. Not a little but a lot. It rained 5 weekends in a row here in New England. I did my best to get out there in the sprinkles to continue the setup process.
Eventually I got setup ok still a tad out of spec but near enough. Still I couldn't mill though. I needed to help my brother in law do some painting. It was only fair he had given me a lot of time. Then we had to go to a wedding.
But last Saturday finally no rain or anything else to do. I milled some junky logs to start to be sure all was ok. They mill ran great....NO problems.
The long and short of things is that I now know more about my mill than I ever wanted to know. I can also say that the folks at Logmaster did a great job supporting me. As we all know mechanical things sometimes break for unexplained reasons. At that point its the service that matters. The Logmaster folks were there for me.
It was good smell that sawdust
