How Sawdust is Made

If you wanted beams and planks for building on the farm you hired a sawyer and sawmill to come to your place, or you used a broadaxe to hew them. The logs (8 to 10 foot spruce) were all cut through the winter using axe and crosscut saw and skidded to the saw site with horses. The logs were stored and the saw was placed at a "setting".
The sawyer was paid per thousand board feet sawn or whatever deal could be made. The small sawmills had a crew of three men, the sawyer, the tail sawyer and the canter.
The sawyer was the boss of the crew, the man with his hand on the controls and the man who decided what would be cut and how. The tail sawyer kept an eye on the cut and took the sawn slabs off and piled them. The canters job (the pictures will help here) was to get the logs onto the carriage from the runway, big end first, and to offset the tail end so the log would be sawn straight, then to set the tail dog to hold it in place. When the log returned after the first cut he would loosen the dog and use a canthook (see below) to give it a half turn so the flat side was against the bunks, then set the dog again. Next cut he gave it a quarter turn, then a half turn on the third pass and he was finished with that log and could get the next on the runway ready while the sawyer ran the squared log back and forth through the saw to make slabs. The sawyer set the front dog.
There were also a couple of other men (or boys) around, to keep a supply of logs on the runway, shovel sawdust or pile lumber, and at least one horse for skidding logs.

The carriage was about ten feet long and four feet wide. It rode on wheels on a pair of steel tracks and was pulled back and forth by a cable arrangement driven through a cone clutch controlled by the sawyer.
The sawblade was about four feet in diamter and had replaceable bits (teeth) and cut about a 1/4 inch kerf. The sawdust was blown along a curved tin trough to the log side of the mill and was then shovelled away. Some of it would be used later as insulation in the icehouse.
The front and tail dogs were mounted on the bunks, they had a sharpened spike which drove down into the log to hold it in place.
The bunks moved laterally through a cog arrangement controlled by a ratchet handle to set the thickness of the cut. There was a sliding gauge on the bunks which the sawyer could see.

Power for the mill came through a pulley and belt arrangement usually connected to a big pulley-wheel farm tractor.

1. Sawblade
2. Carriage
3.Thickness control
4. Front dog
5. Track
6. Cable
7. Carriage conrol
8. Sawyer
9. Canter


A better pic of a canthook and its use


Making firewood--- one way (bucksaw)------------------------------or another (cordwood saw).

My memories of helping my Dad make firewood when I was young. The cordwood saw was similar to the one in the picture but it had a tilting table with a slot for the blade so you didn't have to get so up close and personal. It was gas powered with a belt drive and was damn noisy. I usually got the wood and helped him put it on the table and slide it along. In retrospect it was a pretty dangerous operation I suppose, but I got to help my Dad, and that was good.
I make my firewood with a chainsaw these days and it all seems so...civilized.

My other fond memories of wood are from working at the fibreboard plant. We used wood hooks to toss the four foot pulp logs from the trucks onto wood racks or into the chipper, once on the coldest night ever recorded in this country.
Sometimes the chipper (think of it as a food processor with a seven foot long, multi-ton blade) would reject a frozen log and send it flying halfway down the woodyard, or have it ricochet around the operators position. Time to run, shit or go blind. Ah, good times, good times.

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Pictures from Documenting America-The Library of Congress, a great picture site.