When I retired(mostly just tired) from building custom residential and commercial cabinets for over twenty years,I wanted a way to keep my hand in. You can't really retire with a shop full of woodworking tools and machinery. I decided I wanted to cut my own lumber so I could build grain matched cabinets and furniture. The cost of a commercial bandsaw
mill was out of my price range, so I built a "Granberg" type chainsaw mill. With an 8 h.p. Stihl chainsaw it works well enough(not near as fast as a bandsaw, though). After cutting several large trees and ending up with just a few good boards and a mountain of offcuts, limbs, branches and stumps, I started making tables and benches out of the scraps. When I saw
the interest that these generated I started looking for ways to increase production and build other types of furniture.Having built custom cabinets I just assumed I could build log furniture.(haha). I quickly found out that standard wood-working tools have very little use in building log furniture. The problem is every log is unique(to a cabinet maker that
meant bent, twisted and bowed).There is no "side" to run against the fence, nowhere to take a measurement from. Without a lot of complicated "one off jigs" for each log I didn't see a way to apply mass production. A woodworking lathe spins an unbalanced log so fast that vibration alone is enough to jerk a chisel out of your hand and my lathe only has a 48" capacity. Even a large drill press has a limited stroke and capacity between the column and drill bit. I wasn't impressed with the pencil sharpener type tennoners.I experimented with a plywood benchtop lathe I built that uses a router to cut the tennon. I had run milling machines, metal lathes and CNC routers before, so I decided to build a real machine that worked on the same principles. As I was designing the linear action for this I realized I could build just one action and combine different tools for different jobs. I used 3-D solid modeling software so I could build virtual mock-ups to calculate range of motion, torque, and feed rates for each task. I kept the design simple using "off the shelf" parts. It functions as a sawmill(22" dia.x98" length, also plunge cuts), a large capacity mortise machine(24"x96" bed, 14" vertical stroke), a large capacity drill press 24"x 96" bed, 14" vertical stroke), and a lathe(10"dia. x 108" length). Long story short, I haven't built any cabinets for quite a while. Go to drop box links for more pics and info.
machine: https://www.dropbox.com/sh/nr4yw91iv2hgdl0/AACv5-Unq_KSGyYK-2YHwWIBa?dl=0
furniture the machine builds: https://www.dropbox.com/sh/pq9hfk8rqr7l416/AADQZxeku_HGeIBLpz4MeasIa?dl=0
(No images available for this Shopbuilt Equipment listing.)
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