"Maybe a nice post and beam barn would do me some good” I thought.
So I ran some numbers, and it was somewhere around $10,000 just for lumber for the 30x60 barn I wanted to build. "Shoot, I could buy my own sawmill for less than that."
I then happened to open one of the most prestigious classified ads in my area, a nice thick booklet about 5 ½” by 8”, ¾” thick and crammed with all sorts of junk and treasures you’d want to get your hands on. Jugadro, you know exactly what I'm talking about.
Well, it wasn’t long before I found an ad, that read: “Sawmill number 2 lane w/6 cyl 165hp Cont. diesel eng $1800”
I don't know about you, but I think the shortest, simplest ads are usually reserved for the best stuff you can buy. Most of the time when I see an ad going on about an item some ten lines long, that's because the seller knows it's junk and is hoping he will find some sucker to buy it.
I looked around at other sawmills for sale on-line, and most of them cost twice that, without an engine. So I knew I just had to go and look at this. It turns out, I was the first to call about it, and I set up a time to check it out the very next day, some three hour drive away.
After monotonous hours on the interstate, I had finally arrived to the house, only to find the seller’s wife pointing to the woods and saying he was in the “mill shed, somewhere down the road...” Gee whiz, it started to make me wonder how big this machine was, he has a shed just for it, hidden in the woods.
Sure enough, as I drove down the road towards a clearing in the pine forest, there was a large shed, rustic, and patched together with small logs sawed three sides for 4x4 wall studs, and rough boards over it with a metal roof on top.
The seller had her warmed up and running by the time I arrived. The subtle tone of the diesel exhaust coming out of the straight pipe above the roofline was welcoming. A log was being passed through as the 48 inch circular blade screamed its way through the wood. The noise and wood chips flying out the blower chute outside the shed was enough for me, I was sold.
He brought me on board, had me run the machine a couple passes, and as each board fell off the log, on top of antique iron rollers on the wooden platform next to it, he told me about how he bought it ten years ago from a couple who worked together on it to cut planks for bleachers, how it was a WWII machine, and could cut 20,000 board feet in its heyday with six guys working on it.
I began to wonder to myself “why the hell is he selling this machine? I’d be using it until my kids put me in a nursing home.” It turned out that after open-heart surgery a year and half ago, his doctor told him to cease and desist all work of that sort. But that didn’t stop him from running it a couple more passes that day, with sentiment in his eye “I’ll miss this machine” he said.
It had been a year and half since the machine was cranked over, and belched any smoke, and there it was, humming along as if he was using it yesterday. The only thing amiss was a set of brand new marine starting batteries by the diesel engine. “Someone came in here and stole the batteries” he explained with slight disappointment. “The new ones will go with the mill.”
I quickly wrote out a big fat check to make a large deposit on the machine, took some parting photos and planned to pick it up shortly, somehow… at least now... I knew I was truly a machine junkie!
To be continued....
