Help! Saw Mill design

[Sociotard]

I've been asked to do a writeup for a old fashioned, water wheel powered sawmill, probably from the early Renaissance. I agreed thinking it would be a snap to find a book or website on how they ran sawmills 'back in the day'. Reality is a harsh mistress.

 

Does anyone out there know anything that might be useful? Or of any books/websites I should be investigating?

 

What I have so far: There will probably be a pond formed by a small small dam, appropriatly called a millers pond. There will be stacks of logs near the mill drying out. The miller will have about 4 assistants or apprentices or sons. Gears will be used to connect the wheel to the saw blades. Sawblades are sharpened by hand with a little file.

 

What I don't have: Should the blade be a circle or a ribbon? What other processes and tools besides sawing with the saw are used to work the logs? Would the miller have his own team to move the logs? Would the miller live above the mill or just nearby? Where do the assistants sleep?

 

Any references would be a big help.

[Vanguard00]

The Internet Is Your Friend

 

First, what you have is about all I've ever used. Bear that in mind.

 

Second, no, the "sawyer" does not generally go out and get his own wood. Lumberjacks cut the wood, haul it back to town (or get someone to haul it for them). Sawyers (your sawmill guys) square and smooth the wood for building purposes. Builders get the wood and build stuff. Yes, one guy could be responsible for all of this but he'd be a RICH man in a non-industrial setting.

 

The miller/sawyer could live anywhere you wanted him to. Same with the apprentices. Perhaps the miller has a nice little cottage in town, but the apprentices have a small room in the back of the mill, or maybe a shed.

 

A short encyclopedic entry for sawmill:

 

machine or plant with power-driven machines for sawing logs into rough-squared sections or into planks and boards. A sawmill may be equipped with planing, molding, tenoning, and other machines for finishing processes. The biggest mills are usually situated where timber can be brought by river or rail, and the design of the mill is affected by the mode of transportation.

 

Here's a pretty decent link I stumbled on.

http://www.osv.org/education/WaterPower/Sawmill.html

 

Also check out it's parent page:

http://www.osv.org/education/WaterPower/index.html

Here's one interesting site I found during a quick search. It's not so much about sawmills but it should answer some of your questions about the hows, wheres and so forth:

http://www.allroutes.to/logging/history.htm

 

Also, there's apparently a book by Edmund Gillon entitled "BUILD YOUR OWN SAWMILL (THE WAY THINGS WORK)." It seems to come up a lot in searches so maybe it's helpful. Check with your local library, maybe.

 

Not bad for fifteen minutes' work, eh? Gotta luv the internet

[dugfromthearth]

of course saw mills were individually built and could vary considerably.

 

straight saws are more likely then circular saws, depending upon the time.

 

power is lost at every gear and connection. So the earlier the mill the fewer gears or connections there will be. Basically they will build a waterwheel and connect it to a saw mechanism and then build everything (including the building) around that.

 

early waterwheels had the water flow under them. It was just a wheel with the bottom in a fast moving river.

 

advanced waterwheels had the water flow out a chute when then ran over the top of the wheel. This gave more power and allowed the wheel to be run even if the waterlevel dropped.

 

logs would normally be brought to the sawmill on the water, typically downstream to the sawmill. Your other options were to drag it with horses or to have a skid row or flume - a wooden slide down a hill, you cut the trees and slide them down the hil to the sawmill (common in the northwest which is very hilly, in flat areas they would use the horses).

 

early sawmills just cut the logs. someone had to stripped the branches and bark off of them first.

[Vondy]

considering the time frame you noted the mill would need to be next to a river - since sawmills were traditionally water-wheel driven (and often combined with grist mills).

[Markdoc]

Sawmills were a relatively late development of the watermill, so an overshot mill (ie make a little dam and have the water go over the top of the wheel) wuold probably be the commonest design.

 

Round saw blades were a very late development - probably not appropriate for a renaissance era mill. One thing that made sawmills a late development was the need to make large high quality steel blades - those suckers get hot! So someone needs to hop around the log wetting the blade down so it doesn't overheat. I wonder what the life expectancy of a Sawyer's helper was....

 

Generally, logs were brought in by water or oxen, as noted. The branches were cut off with axes at the site where the tree was cut down, so you only get the big ol' logs at the samill. The saw is used to cut them into planks - which are are then finished (ie: made smooth) with an adze, or - in the later stages a plane or "scrubber" - the later being a heavy scouring stone.

 

Sawmills were often associated with other sort of mills and the expense to build them means that they would normally only be found where there was substantial demand - a big city, a shipyard, etc. In that case there would also be a big demand for bread, metal etc, so generally mills tended to be found in groups where the terrain favoured their construction - early factory districts, if you like. They almost always had a fairish number of houses around: bringing stuff in and out of the mills, processing it and keeping the mill running was a big job. There are a few places like this not far from Copenhagen where I live which are essentially multi-mill-centred villages. The surviving buildings are only 2-300 years old, but they are built on medieval foundations. There is a working mill built on essentially the same pattern at Esrum Cloister also nearby, which dates back to medieval times. so things did not change that much in the interim.

 

cheers, Mark

[Sociotard]

*does backflip* Thank you all! This was great stuff. If ever something esoteric and unsual needs to be known, gamers are the ones to ask.

[Farkling]

About the poor hopping apprentince...

 

The mill I saw in England...(I think it was somewhere between Alconbury and Cambridge...we found it on one of ourt bicycle tours)...that mill had a seperate small trough coming off the top of the water wheel to drip river water onto the blade as it spun.

 

For a more industrial approach to medieval application, you should see if the local library/used bookstores have copies of Leo Frankowski's Crosstime Engineer series. There are some excessively interesting engineering design approaches to medieval costruction materials at ThreeWalls.

[PhilFleischmann]

Well, I'm certainly impressed. But I have one question:

 

If they wet down the blade to keep it from overheating, won't the wood get wet when it come into contact with the wet blade? Wood expands when it gets wet, which can cause the blade to jam. What did they do about this?

[AnotherSkip]

I dont think the wood had enough time to get affected.

 

I ought ta know I used to be in a lumberyard. getting dents out of wooden doors takes about a minute for the wood to swell using a steam iron. Hopefully by then the wood will be past the point of a cutting blade.

 

also weren't they cutting wet wood or was it dry by that point?

[McCoy]

Originally posted by AnotherSkip

also weren't they cutting wet wood or was it dry by that point?

Would think the logs would have to be fairly dry. Wouldn't lumber cut from green wood warp more as it dried? So the logs would have to be stacked so they seasoned for months, or even years, before being cut.

[Alcamtar]

Originally posted by McCoy

Would think the logs would have to be fairly dry. Wouldn't lumber cut from green wood warp more as it dried? So the logs would have to be stacked so they seasoned for months, or even years, before being cut.

 

In the Pacific Northwest, they used to store logs in large ponds before cutting. The logs got so soaked they'd sometimes sink to the bottom. Nowadays, they stack them in large piles, but run sprinklers continuously over the stacks to keep them from drying out. The water is supposed to be cold, all surfaces of the wood are supposed to be soaked continuously.

 

I don't remember why -- I think it's to keep the logs from splitting as they dry, or maybe to keep them from fermenting/spoiling.

 

Let's see, reasons for soaking, from various online sources:

- help remove dirt and bark that could dull a saw blade

- enabled the bark to be peeled off easily before cutting

- keeps the dust down

- prevent logs from splitting as they dry

- at 80% water content, insect do not lay eggs and fungi cannot develop. existing parasites are eliminated in a matter of days.

- soften the wood for cutting

In recent times, there have been efforts to recover logs sunken in rivers and lakes from old logging operations; 200-year old logs are well preserved!

Mike

[AnotherSkip]

Also from my lumberyard experience the unopened bunk, even if years older, will have few to no warped pieces of wood. Once you open a bunk and people start to go through it you begin to have problems. IIRC they now kiln dry the finished bunks of wood in order to get the moisture out of them. Depending upon how modern the "old fashioned" sawmill is there might be a rather large kiln nearby or on the premises for "quickly" drying the finished bunks of wood. Rather than waiting fer them to dry naturally.

 

If you have superheroes about, it takes around 5000 lbs of lift to safely move most bunks(wt varies by length of bunks) of dried wood (35- 40 Str range) at about 208 pcs per bunk of 2x4 iirc. the number of pieces drop by the width of the boards because each bunk is the same size. Also if I remember my labels correctly wet wood is x4 as much weight.

 

Check out the labels at your local store next time. Or talk to them, most of the stores have someone who has that information in their head.

 

 

Oh yeah if the high Str guys are using them for clubs one hit and the stuff holding them together will break and then you have a biiiiig mess on your hands. Even a 4+ ft drop will break those bands.

[Captain Obvious]

I see that this question has already been pretty adequately answered, but for future reference on similar questions, a good book to have is Frontier Living by Edwin Tunis. It's about the American frontier, but the technology levels involved there weren't much more advanced than typical fantasy levels until about 150 years ago.

 

For the record, Vanguard's link shows exactly the sort of sawmill that was in use around 1800, according to Tunis.