Maxing Out the HM130Max with 22 HP

And today, we're going to dig into the heart of our mill, the motor on this thing. And with the abuse that Jason and I have given this thing, not just by mowing through giant logs, we also did some factory or unfactory settings to make this thing run. The motor running at a consistent speed, and now I'm also losing oil everywhere. But today, my friend Jeff, one of our members, decided to come on up here and say, Hey, I'm gonna give two guys a hand because they don't even know how to change the oil realistically while I'm out having bonbons coffee my friend Jeff here is going to take this motor off and Jay and I are going to watch him and then we're going to throw a giant log up here and see if this modification was worth it so let's get into it guys and see what this is going to take. You ready for this Jeff? Yeah I'm ready, I'm ready. Thanks for being here so today we're going to try to replace it with the Predator 22 horsepower 670 gasoline engine and this is just not a bolt and play and get to working here we're gonna have to make some modifications we're gonna have to get a gas tank system hooked up with this and the way that the Predator muffler is, it's not gonna work on the sawmill so we got a replacement muffler and we're gonna have to put a high-rise muffler in so that it gets away from the end of our frame on the sawmill itself so this is not just hey we're gonna put up a motor we have to get the clutch all lined up get everything straight, get everything running. So the question is, is this modification really worth it? Is this 22 horsepower motor gonna make the difference on this sawmill compared to the 14 horsepower? It's gonna make it like the 36. It's gonna make it just like the 36. That's what I'm hoping for too. So let me know, do you really think that this modification is gonna be worth changing the 130 or should we have just bought a different mill? So the first thing that that we actually need to do is to get this whole old motor out of the way so we're going to remove everything from here we're going to have to check to see if the new motor the bolt patterns are they going to line up are we going to need to drill it we're going to have to make room for a gas tank somewhere we don't actually have all the answers yet but that's what we're looking to do we need to get the battery out of the way and we're going to actually need to get the clutch everything from the inside here and we're going to bolt on our unit first just to see where it has and then we're going to see exactly what we need to do with the exhaust system so as we go along we'll show you step by step as things are coming off and we'll go from there it looks like the exhaust system is going to be the complication huh i think it is out with the old right there uh line up with those two bolts gotcha is it just a protection yeah that and keep sawdust out of there. Gotcha. All right. Well that's easy enough to grind that off. Yeah. We can just bend it straight up. Oh okay. I clean up every damn thing when I take it apart. Food equipment too? Well in the kitchens in those schools I had to I had to do all the you take it apart clean it up before you put it back together. Better with two people. Hell we might go on up with it if you want to go. Are you clear? Yeah. Are we stuck through the hole over there? Let me see. yeah i need to come over to about right in there somewhere don't i yeah they run the bolts on that other one through from the bottom battery platform or a gas platform we even got green paint did you really yeah in the bed of my truck okay the the stock uh honda exhaust that we bought the high top exhaust the plates where you actually bolt in the exhaust system were slightly askew so this was the i guess say the hardest thing but i found a welding shop that i've never been to he actually cut them off and he straightened them out exactly where they wanted to be i can't believe that one he did it in 10 minutes and two it was only 50 bucks so it was way worth it uh to get exactly what we needed but i know when you're looking at ai it's going to tell you that this is an exact clone of the honda but the exhaust ports were not they were different but it worked out in the end problem solved problem solved 50 problem solved i like it okay different now so the main modification for this muffler system is that the original will not fit and you can see uh with the bar here and this is where we mounted the battery we wanted to make this look like a professional unit and let's just say not to be hokey put down we put the same exact gas tank how they had it set up for the Woodland Mills HM136 um but that's the main reason why is this frame here everything needs to pass because now we're in the full position you need to make sure all your piping your wiring your batteries and your mufflers out of the way and i ported mine this direction you can buy this muffler where ports here didn't make sense i'm going to put a link in the description of where i bought mine but it's going to need to be modified so before we jump in and give it its first let's say test run we haven't even started this thing yet let's go over the quick modifications and what you had to do and honestly Jeff this was super I had to leave for a few hours yesterday I came back these guys tore the motor off tore everything off had this this was just a bolt and play right you did nothing lined up lined right up um so I actually watched Jeff do it I know so there was no modification from the motor to the motor plate um I can tell there uh he did make a slight modification for this gas tank right here because the one thing about the predator motor it needs to have some sort of gas tank we wanted to have everything ride uh let's say the trolley along with it as opposed to having a bunch of cables so all he really that's a 136 gas tank and hose everything was because with this motor all you had to do was plug the gas line in and automatically came with a fuel filter inline fuel filter uh so the same exact setup uh you can buy yourself another tank you can buy yourself from Woodland Mills you can go on Amazon and get yourself a boat tank all gonna work this throttle cable loose and hook correct into it so that's uh if you get into outside of this is the normal way that you would have run this motor and you probably could if you wanted to hook it back up he hooked our throttle cable back into it and um really probably I would say a little bit of time that we spent because this was all done in one day was to get the watering system to work or your lubricating system now it's not one hundred percent mounted on there everything seems to work uh on our next video we're gonna do a modification uh of how our lube system is gonna work we're not going to get that done right now there's going to be a reason why because none of this is going to work on the next mod we've got going on so we decided that we can't wait much longer here and we want to start this thing and we're going to mow into some wood jeff really wants to you all see the first cut yeah it has not been in a log yet now the only thing we didn't go over as far as the modifications up here we just made a simple bracket bolted the battery terminal back in place so new battery cables made and we did we did have to go and get a couple of longer battery cables to make that stuff work out we've tied everything off so it's not near the muffler not going to have any issues i like that battery box i do like the battery box good job jeff we'll have to test and see how long that that stays up there but it's actually pretty stable i don't think we're going to have a problem at all we're on that side over there okay so i know in the beginning i told you that i ordered the clutch for the 136 which is a much bigger clutch for the stronger motor it wasn't here yet and jeff being so excited wanting to see this thing cut i found out from another member friend of mine that the original clutch from the 130 or the 14 horsepower motor we got it on there fit it no problem you wouldn't want to run it that way forever you know i don't i think you could probably run it until it didn't work anymore i mean i can't say we haven't even turned this motor on so i can't say if this is actually going to cut through this old piece of poplar that we have here or uh maybe you could run it this way i still did order the bigger clutch which i'm gonna put on and uh complete it probably wouldn't last as long as that big heavy duty one correct so oh it'll run i mean but now it runs and i just yanked it off of my old motor so it's not like i bought anything if you had to buy one i'd go for the bigger one and it fit i mean everything lined up the uh i don't want to say the shaft fit the squareness fit we just hooked everything right back up i thought it was going to take a lot of finesse to get that thing moving you have to shim it or something it did take a lot this is pretty much why we put this off for so long because i wasn't exactly sure what it was going to do it's a very easy swap well it looks easy now that jeff has it done i know and it's not like you did that you didn't yeah and you didn't you know he's never done this before he's a don't tie jay i mean you're you're a hobby fix it guy or am i right especially after we figured out the bracket on you figure out these brackets and yeah piece of cake the motor's a piece of cake it just bolts right up i mean you were here literally in three hours you need two people to set that motor up in there yeah you know it's heavy now i got the old one off by myself but takes two to put that i bet it did 100 pounds and we were lucky to get that done so fast so let's get into it let's see what it cuts with a regular inch and a quarter blade let's first see how it even runs let's get the cat out of here should we here we go buddy let's see what she sounds like it looks neat doesn't it it does look good and that matters oh my god what do you think Jeff do you hear that i barely hear that compared to the last one clutch is engaging are we all tightened up everything good okay i took over half of that cut just to see how the blade felt um and really we would never be running a regular this is a re-sharp blade i don't even know how many re-sharps in them this is an old piece of hickory not excuse me poplar poplar almost made a mistake there but this is an old piece of poplar which sometimes is not easy to cut if you look this is the the cut that we made with the 130 max before we change the motor you can see the ridiculous i mean can you see that the ridiculous dip in this right here yeah you can see it and that's because your motor is not giving consistent blade speed and i was just super impressed just on this little bit of cut that i had that how consistent the motor was running how consistent the blade was running so if you look we used the same exact blade when we tested the old motor to the new motor and this cut is a lot flatter i don't want to say that it's perfect but it is a lot flatter for you and normally we're going to run inch and a half blades and that's why we put a little bit of extra strain on our old motor because it takes more horsepower more torque to keep those big blades running so that's normally what we do we're going to throw one on right now and we're going to see if that motor can stay at the consistent speed run nice and even run quick and how flat we can cut one i am super impressed on how quiet this motor feels or the i guess the dbs in your ears it it is smooth smooth running from start to finish it almost feels like we're milling in the library it's it's running right now you can't even tell it's so quiet so let's see if it actually will hold its horsepower run consistent we're running inch and a half these are carbide blades so it does help with the cutting but these are big thick bands so hang on well that was a mess wasn't it so we just and without you making a comment we just answered the question in two cuts uh this clutch was starting to smoke and right now it is a it is a million degrees um so we're gonna wait to get the new clutch put on here i'm thinking with the torque of this motor the speed of this motor and we just put this big blade on uh the clutch did not like that that should have cut like butter it should have cut like butter look how smooth it was it cut it cut it super smooth but it cut it super oh wow it caught uh there was definitely issues of everything getting heated up look how that did on the end of that it's not the most consistent thickness ever okay waiting on a new clutch look at the difference in the size of the 136 clutch this was the clutch that came off the 130. uh the one that we actually burnt up i'm not thinking that this one is going to have an issue it almost looks like it's three times the size of it but we can't just slip it through the hole so we're now removing the motor and we're going to have to remove this guard plate here and that should do that and we'll check that out six times the weight it's six times the weight so after we burnt out the original clutch from the 130 max you can see the difference in the size of this even here so i'm thinking that this is a good reason on why we're showing you and we're testing this out because we couldn't just put the new clutch in we had to unbolt the motor because this gigantic clutch right here has to come in from the back side and there was nothing that was needed here it fit completely right through the hole and it really was centered with our belt but you could just see the difference in size here now the only thing that's happening that's different right now we don't know if this is going to affect it or not affect it is that this being smaller our blade is actually running across the belt now there might be room right there but it is touching right here and the belt has the same thickness as our drive wheels so it's really riding on the belt it's not riding on the clutch everything is parallel so i'm hoping i guess the blade might have more grip with it i don't think so but uh we're gonna find out exactly what this is but what you needed to do is you need to get this clutch installed on the motor before you put this in unfortunately for us we had to remove the motor and put it in so that helped us that slowed us down just a little bit but it still was not that big a deal so i'm guessing at this point here we have the same blade that we ran with the 130 max and the original clutch we have the same blades that we used and burned this clutch out we're going to make a cut we're going to try to to find out if the motor is giving us consistent speed, a flat cut, and if we're having any issues with this right here. So that's what we're going to do. Cross your fingers. I think it's going to run fine. And we're not actually running through a, this is an old dry piece of poplar and it's 16 inches wide. So we have a lot of drag. We have a lot of things in the way, but let's first try with this blade see how it does and then we'll move on and test with a bigger blade if everything works out which blade do we have on here this is just a regular uh resharp quarter resharp so it's a resharp it was the same blade we showed on the first cut with the 130 it was the same blade that we used when we did uh this test and then we'll test that inch and a half carbide but If everything works out fine with this clutch, the cut is good, we'll put the bigger blade on and see if we have any issues with that. But I'm not thinking so. Let's get after it. Let's get after it, boys. Yep. You can hear the consistency of that motor. It sounds so nice. And the blade didn't move any. When you actually cut out the log, the blade stayed right where it was. Other than this being really hard and we're using a regular carbon blade, let's see how it looks. Let's see how flat it is. want a go-kart now because that sounds good it does beautiful let's just check this out because it actually looked like a really really good cut sure looks good from to the eye and we're getting to the center of this thing so we're carving right through the pith of this thing but i don't know if you could tell by the video you you didn't hear the motor at all chug and that's what's going to give you the flatter boards very nothing there there's nothing there i mean are you seeing something i'm not seeing anything i think you just picked it up on that edge i know so there we go with the first blade on there and the first clutch we didn't have any trouble it's not even rising it's not starting yet so because we're getting consistent speed as we go and i know everybody Everybody complains that when they put their blade in, they get a dip and then it starts to rise and wade. He did it for three quarters of an inch. That's one of the smallest dips we've had. Instead of the five inches. So look right here. It didn't do that. It didn't do it. It's just that one. It's right there where the center of that is. Well, this log's not cut square, so it may have made it. So I'm calling that a win-win with a regular blade. The only thing let's do is let's try it with a big inch and a half carbide. see if we get a smoother even cut let's see if the motor can keep up with the extra blade and I'm gonna call that a win yeah that's beautiful yes so you can see this is not a fresh log we're right well 79 we're running at 18 percent with our timber frame we're only looking to get down under 25 percent so I just wanted to show you that this is a much harder log than if I just dropped the tree and put it on there so cutting it with a regular blade could give you issues especially if your motor isn't running consistently and we've had that issue with the 14 horsepower motor but right now we have the inch and a half carbide tip blades on here that's going to take a little bit more power to run and hopefully it's a little bit smoother of a cut and not only that i mean if guys look at the log where we're cut we're not in the sapwood i'm gonna cut right now through the center of that heart we're going to be 16 inches wide through the hardest part of that log i'm really just trying to see if this motor will stay at a consistent speed no i'm not running rpms i'm just listening for what's happening which is really all i think you need to do let's see how how that goes, Jay. Let's do it. I am at an inch. Let's see how carbide runs. I didn't hear any stumble in the motor. Actually, Sam, I was running a little more RPMs than with that other one. You know, I really was, to be honest with you, it was very easy to cut. I wasn't pushing at all. I was just letting the blade cut. I think with the torque of this motor, the carbide tip blades, you probably could run a pretty pretty much you know quite a bit bigger feed rate than what you have but the most important part for us at this point smoother cut is did it cut flat that's what we want to know did it cut flat because the motor speed is one of the key i know you need a sharp blade that is a sharp blade but the motor speed is one of the key differences of keeping your lumber flat now was that a new carbide or a used carbide we uh we ran it we ran the car that's i want to say it's pretty new okay we ran the first cut so that's the same carbide where we smoked the clutch on the first one but right now and i know i keep showing you here i got one it's so much it went through a knot right here too yeah it's so microscopic uh you guys are not even gonna pick that up I wouldn't pick that that's perfectly flat let's see how it did enough to feel it really felt I mean it looked like it looked and sounded good like there was no vibration no another thing is right through here we were in a crack we saw through a crack right through here that's not bad and that could have yep given a little wave a little wave that wasn't much so this is what the carbide blade is gonna do for you one it's easier to cut look how smooth do you see any teeth marks I don't see I've been playing this is almost like you don't have to plane it but if you're gonna plane this wood you don't have to worry about your blades on your planer because you've got a flat setup going here this would just be microscopic planing right microscopic yeah well one you needed to dry so it might give you a little bit of curl when it's drying pretty good we had a little bit coming in that's kind of our standard entry up so we know that when we're coming when we actually start this gave us a little bit more than it did with the other blade but it could be I mean look we just split dead center down that heart it doesn't get any harder that's a hard thing right there so i'm gonna finish cutting these off jay okay and i'm gonna call this a win-win yeah i think so i do too gotta love it there ain't nothing better than having more power no doubt especially with gas prices so that's something that i always wanted to find out is what would my HM 130 Max do with a 22 horsepower predator and quite frankly for first few cuts i was impressed i'm impressed so much with the sound of this thing and the consistency of the motor and how easy you it was to put this together so don't think that this is uh something that's you need to be a super uh i could do another one in two hours there you go you called jeff that's what you do you contact two guys you join our membership program jeff's on the way over to your house he's gonna put a predator motor in for you he's got everything down pat you gotta feed me good he does so guys how are you liking what we want to know is how are you really liking the uh max your mill series and what would you want to do what would be your next uh something that you want to upgrade on your mill to make it better we'd actually like to know jeff what are you going to do to max your mill this oh yeah good answer so mine won't take years long so we'll have two behind his back love it thanks jeff thanks guys we'll see you on the next one. Bye