I thought it may be interesting to share some of the history behind who we are in the sawing world.
When I was a kid, 9 or so, My grandfather bought an old circle mill....home made outfit from an old guy who had seen pictures. Anyway...he paid like $240 in probably 1970.
Now my grandfather was a carpenter and woodworker....built grandfather clocks, and stuff like that, and there just wasn't any sources of black walnut available....or cherry, or other hardwoods...but there were creek bottoms around with huge walnuts, and cherry trees could be found....pecan, hickory, bios-de-arc, and other woods were around.....so I remember him studying the Bellsaw Bulletins and seriously thinking about building a circle mill with the Belsaw kit, and then the estate sale came along with the mill he bought.
The mill had not ran in probably 40 years, and he sent the blade off to Kansas City to get checked and polished at Belsaw....and then we started sawing black walnut. My grandfather knew nothing about circle milling.....and dived right in. Had he lived now, he would have probably been really enthused by bandmilling, simply because it would have been easier to manage. Take the mill to the tree, and so on.
