Ok, so here's the history:
A while back a friend of mine who owns a 1995 or so LT40HD with a Diesel engine hired me to run his saw for a custom sawing job he lined up. He was going to be there and run his edger while I was running his saw.
During this job we/I noticed that the blade guide roller, the inner one closest to the drive wheel was loose, and by loose I mean it moved some when we changed a blade, which as we all know it's not suppose to do. And we tried to tighten it up by turning the bolts that align the part shown below at the red arrow, as these were the ones loose and causing it to be out of alignment and not correct.
We noticed that the part that the red arrow is pointing to was bent and that at least one of the adjustment bolts, where the blue arrow is pointing to, were stripped out of the block it is in. This is not good as this block is a welded part of the mill.
During a visit to the open house in Maine, he purchased a kit that had a new block in it and a piece that needed to be welded to the frame and then this block bolts to this new welded in mounting bracket block.
He had his friend at work, a mechanic, cut off the old block, and weld this new bracket-block to the frame, and paint it. It came out very nice.
He then installed the new roller block and slid in the new roller assembly that he got.
After all this was done, he called me and asked me to come over to his sawmill and help him align his blade.
I read all the instructions that came with the new piece he had welded in and this was done correctly. And the new instructions said to follow the standard alignment instructions that came with the manual.
Yesterday morning we aligned the blade per the regular instructions manual procedures, but we skipped some parts as the outer movable roller guide wasn't effected with this repair.
After creating the deflection, and aligning the roller as shown in the above drawing, and aligning the blade with the blade tilt tool:
we felt the new roller was in the correct position. And with all the adjustment jamb nuts tight we proceeded to saw some lumber.
Now we had the sawmill in a barn with the doors closed to hold what little heat we had, and we didn't want to run the sawmill engine a lot as it was a diesel, so we decided to grab an old beam he had on hand and try cutting it into 5/4 boards, which he needed for another window repair project.
Well it cut great boards each coming out 5/4" thick on each edge and we checked them in several places on each board. Both ends and several different spots in the middle.
However, I mentioned to him that these were boards that were created by using the 5/4 scale ruler and that the true test to alignment was creating and measuring the last board on the mill, between his clamp and the bed-rail dogs.
As we measured the last board it seemed that this one maybe off a bit. It was thicker by up to 1/16" or maybe a little more.
And I thought before we changed any other settings I'd ask you guys what would you do?
My first thought was to change the scale pointer to lower it by 1/16" but this could be the wrong solution as we set the blade height above the rail to 15" at the new roller and 15 1/16" at the other roller with the guide arm fully extended. And the pointer was pointing to exactly 15".
If the last board is truly too thick, what is the solution to make it the correct thickness?He wanted to test the mill more by sawing out some logs and seeing if each one had a thick board left on the mill before we make any other setting changes. And I agreed with him that this one old beam was not be best piece to test the mill alignment on.
Any advice would be appreciated.
Thanks in advance.
Jim Rogers
