LT 300 Upgrade (or was it a down grade?)

[tnlogger]

 I dont know 32000 a wk =384000 thousand in 3 mnths and 768000 in 6 mnths now then if you take an average of 900 bf to a blade that means you change blades a total of 853.33 time in 6 months.
that there is a whole lota sawing in any bodys book. 

[smwwoody]

tnlogger

If you doubt my 32000 / week you are welcome to come and watch me saw any time you wish.  I saw monday through friday 7:00am to 6:00pm lunch is from 12 noon till 1:00pm.   I could also be there any other time that would fit your schedule.  You should redo your math with an average of 2000 to 3000 bf per band change.  that is closer to what I am running in oak it is not quite as good in hickory.  Your math fits closer to what we are getting with the belted wheels.  that is one of our problems with the belted wheels.  This is not a hobby mill.  it is a industrial quality production small band band mill. Wood Mizer clames it is capable of producing 10000bf pef 10 hour day that is with a back up sawyer to step in when the head sawyer needs a break.  I don't doubt it one little bit.  I have had 10 hour days well over 8000 feet with out a back up sawyer.   

The out of round Idea sounds like the best one to me.  but as jason said we dont have time to fart around with it.  we did keep the old wheels but the crown is gone so they are no good to put back on.  the new ones were a tested working product from a great copany like wood mizer so we had no reason to doubt that they would work for us.

Have I said lately What a  GREAT! copany Wood mizer is?  They told us today they are sending us a new set of crowned wheels to run while they try to figure out what our problem is.

Woody

[tnlogger]

  woody i wasn't doughting ya i was complementing ya i know what a lt300 can do 
as far as the band changes go thats fantastic.
gf said
My next question would be what the hardness of the metal is they are using in the band wheels, recrowning them every 3-4 months seems a little extreme to me.
3 or 4 months for you is like a year or more for most of us 

[Tom]

I'll bet a local machine shop could recrown your wheels too.

[smwwoody]

Tom

I had the same thought too. but wood mizer had them set up on an exchange program where you call them and tell them you need a new set of wheels.  they ship the new ones out you swap them for the old ones and send them back this made for very short down time.  We just ended up getting somethig that didn't work for us and it messed things up.

tn logger

 sorry I took that the wrong way it has just been a little frustrating with all the fartting around.

We love them 4 degree WM blades

Woody

[FiremanEd]

Hey guys, haven't been on in a couple weeks.

Just a few thoughts on what we've been experiencing lately.

1st and formost, the Customer Service from WM is absolutely the best I have EVER experienced. Gary and J.B. at WM are falling over backwards to fix this issue. If this was a product of any other company that I've ever dealt with (sawmill or otherwise) they would have hung up on Woody and I by now. Instead they're calling us 2-4 times a day checking on our status. Sending us stuff to try to remediate the problem. They are truely concerned with fixing this problem, ASAP.

Yesterday J.B. suggested that since we'd tried a lot of things and none were working that he send me a set of newly crowned wheels to have on hand incase I decided to go back to them. He's overnighting a set of 100lb wheels to me at no charge. That's customer service!!

We made 2 changes when we did this upgrade. We went from the sandwich only blade guides w/ a backing roller to guides w/ hold down rollers and we went from crowned wheels to belted wheels. The next step is going to be to put newly crowned wheels on w/ the holddown rollers and diagnose which of these were/are causing the problem. Then maybe we can figure out where to go from there. J.B. is as concerned about our bottom line as much as he is about fixing the problem and is genuinely concerned w/ not being able to get this fixed. We're gonna probably try the crowned wheels tomorrow morning and see what happens.

Some questions above were to the longevity of the wheels needing to be recrowned every 3 months. At 1st I had the same reaction but, in that  3 months Woody put over 300 hours on the mill and produced on average 4 trailer loads of lumber a week, that's 52 - 8,000+bf trailer loads or 416,000 bf of lumber. A set of $600 wheels isn't unreasonable for what they produced, we average around $1,000 a month in blade costs so $200 in wheels isn't that bad.

As to belted vs. crowned, I don't really care. I can make a good argument for both from what I've seen. I do know that WM has put a LOT of R&D into this question and determined that the belts work good on their new LT300's. I don't question that decision at all and would not hesitate to order a WM w/ belted wheels. I also know from past experiences that when you try to change a good thing it doesn't always work out as planned. As the old cliche' says "if it aint broke, don't fix it".  As Buzz said "get your wheels back".

This has been a little frustrating for Woody and myself but that's life. We'll get it fixed this week (we know what freshly crowned wheels and the original sandwich blade guides will do!) and go on from there. We're still 2 of Wood Mizer's biggest supporters and I will say without hesitation that any future mills for me will be Wood-Mizer grey green!!

[gmmills]

Ed,

  You and Woody keep us posted on the progress. My LT 70 has the roller style guides with sandwich pads . I think I would check the rollers to make sure they are are ground perfectly round. If they are out of round they will cause some cutting issues. The rollers that came on my mill were 1 1/4" rollers which I believe are WM's standard for this guide system using 1 1/2" blades. The first thing I did was to change the 1 1/4" rollers to a 1 1/2" rollers. I like the performance of the 1 1/2" rollers with 1 1/2" blades. An 1 1/2" roller contacts 1/4" more width of the band body. This distributes the down pressure more evenly across the width of the blade. In my opinion makes the blade more stable. The more stable the blade the better the cutting performance. You may want to try them.

[smwwoody]

Ed

If you park a new green one beside the gray one you can have the greenie.  I don't like change.

remember when you order that green one make it a left handed one so we can drag race all day long 

Woody

[customsawyer]

I don't get on here as often as I would like to so I'm a little slow in my reply. I run the LT 40 and I have gone to the smaller belts on it also I use a B-56 belt on both wheels drive and idler. I cut alot of different types of wood and hard and soft but my biggest trouble comes when I'm sawing wood that has dried a bit, seems like that fine dry sawdust floats around behind the covers and then gets under the belts. SYP seems to give me most of the trouble when it is dry because there is enough pitch left in it that it really sticks to the wheel. This post might be a day late and a dollar short.
Best of luck.

[smwwoody]

Well Saturday Eddie put the new steel wheels on that wood mizer sent.

I can't waite to get my fingers on it monday morning to see if it is back

Woody

[tnlogger]

Woody glad to hear it. I know you and ED both have been beating you heads against the wall over this.
 Woodmizer has one of the best support teams i know of so i know this has been bothering them to.
 When the weather cools down i have ya on my list for a road trip. I want to see that bad boy in action 

[FiremanEd]

I made a couple quick cuts w/ it Sat and it appears to be back to what we're used to. The proof will be about 8 tomorrow morning after Woddy's got an hour on the blade to heat everything up and see what it's doing then.

Once again I want to say that Woodmizer has been GREAT through all of this. JB and Gary are still working on this and I'm sure will figure it out. In the mean time we're running the steel wheels and making some lumber.

Orange, grey or green. Woodmizer is the way to go!!!!!   

Ed

[FiremanEd]

Gene,

Come on over anytime. If you're waiting on a cool time it might be a while though....   

We're looking forward to your visit.


Ed

[smwwoody]

Well  The 300 is back to being a real cuting machine
I ran it untill about 10:30 AM with the steel wheels and the roller guides it worked great.  then a bearing in the roller guides froze up.  We put the old sandwich guids back on and went right back to macking boards.  We have it fixed.  Now I hope we can help Wood Mizer figure out why the belted wheels would not work on this mill...  the are a great copany and I am sure they will do what ever it takes to find what the problem was.  They are going to put the belted wheels that we have on one of thier test mills to see what they can find.

Woody