2013 Paul Bunyan Portable Sawmill Shootout | Timbery

It is always great to see new equipment at the Shoot-Out. This year, Timbery made its debut with the M285, their newest product. The manual band saw is powered by a 25-hp Subaru gas engine.

The version demonstrated at the Shoot-Out can handle logs up to 28 inches in diameter by 17 feet 2 inches long. Sawyer Chad Sanders has worked with Timbery for the past two years. "Timbery was originally manufactured in Canada, but that was recently moved to Indianapolis, Indiana," he explained. "Our machine design focuses on simplicity and ease of maintenance," he added.

Normally working in sales, Chad's experience in sawing was pretty much limited to demonstrations at shows. His tailman, Mark Thompson, is from South Africa and made the trip specifically to see a North American show. According to Chad, Mark was amazed at the size of the equipment and all of the hydraulics. He pointed out that it is very different from South Africa where muscle power often still dom­inates. With only a week to practice together for the Shoot-Out, the team managed to work smoothly. According to Chad, there were no surprises. "The mill worked beautifully. Everything ran the way it was supposed to run," he recalled. As far as the milling, Chad says that he just milled the log into a cant, and then maintained the cutting pattern to cut 2-inch-thick boards.

The team was able to cut their 365 board feet of lumber in 51 min­utes, 13 seconds, for a rate of 427 board-feet per hour. Their cutting efficiency was at just 2% under the log scale. They would have exceeded the log scale if two of their boards had not been rejected-one for excessive wane, and the other for being just shy of the 1-inch minimum thickness. That's a very respectable yield and cutting time for any manual band saw mill. While Timbery only had one mill in the Shoot-Out, their line of sawmills includes an M280 that is similar to the M285 but without a trailer, and the newly released M100 which is a simple, compact personal mill. In fact, Timbery chose to use the Paul Bunyan Show and the additional draw of The Great Portable Sawmill Shoot-Out® to launch the M100 and show it for the first time ever at their booth.