Turn Your Hobby Sawmill Into a Precision Mill

What if you could turn your sawmill into a precision sawmill without buying a new sawmill? Instead of measuring every cut, cranking the head up and down, and trying to hit the same measurement every time, this mill does it for you. So here's what I really want to know. Is it actually accurate enough to make a difference? Because if this works the way that I think it will, we're not just adding an electronic control. We're turning a hobby sawmill into a precision cutting machine. Jay and I are starting a new series, How to Match Your Mill. There's so many options of the upgrades that you can put on a mill that we're going to test each and every one of them. And today we're going to check out what this can do. Human error. Without guessing. It still wanted zero. The entire board. You want to get your commander system. One of the things that we're here to test is the actual accuracy of this unit compared to manually. And that's the problem with a hobby sawmill is that you're either manually using your powerhead or you're old school and you're still cranking and you're reading off a measurement here. So there's always a possibility that this human error or I've missed it and my boards are not going to be consistent. So we're going to run this thing through the test to see how accurate and how consistent each board is without guessing. So this particular control panel or unit actually does several different things. But today we're only going to deal with the commander package, which is your DRO and your set work system. And it will attach to any, any power lift system on any of the saws, not just the Woodland Mills, the Norwood, the Mechmax, the Frontier, the Wood-Mizer. Now, if you do not have a power lift system, in most cases, they do have a power motor that's going to fit the sawmill that you have. So you're able to take your hand crank off, which is definitely a benefit. And you're going to be able to get yourself a power lift and a DRO and your set works and the installation of it. I know it looks like a ton of wires, but it's really not. The installation is very simple and it does come. And in most cases, it's meant to mount on your push bar here because of my particular unit. And this is a travel unit. My push bar folds in when we're traveling. So all's I did is I went down to the plumbing store. It's a little hard to find. And I got a plumbing attachment piece. I got a one inch piece of pipe, eight inches long, and I just fastened my unit to there. Very, very simple. The only thing that you need to do to get this system running is actually attach the two black and white batteries over to your battery. And then you're going to need to cut in to your motor system here and just plug in the control wire from there. That's it. That's the whole setup with what you got going on. What you're going to do is for the measurement portion of this is you're going to remove like what we did is we removed. We had the little red number that was giving us exactly what measurements we were. And if you look here on the bottom, it still does have that line. So you're able to put your unit on, measure where you want to be, and then this small table here, everything is being read off of this. So once you get this set up, it's a one, two, three operation. I've already noticed after running this for a day and a half, and we cut a lot of lumber with it yesterday, I did not look at this even one time. So to get this unit put on, to get it connected up, to change your system, it really took less than an hour to get this in motion. When you do set this unit up, it's real simple. What you want to do is we're actually just pushing our head over our bunk. And what I did is I set my saw blade exactly where I want it to be at 12 inches. And then what you do is you come back into here, into your control panel, which is simple. It's going to give you the things that you need to do. I went to set my bunk distance. So you just hit to the go-to button here. And my bunk distance was at 12 inches. It's defaulted to 12 inches. So every time that, let's say I wanted to double check my measurement or I recalibrate it, I set my saw mill to 12 inches. I opened up my go-to. I would hit this go-to one more time and it would be set at 12 inches. Now my mill is not set there. So I'm just going to go back to that scenario. That was all that we needed to do to do that. You're able, you could have, instead of being 12, you could manually punch in the numbers. I'm at nine and five sixteenths. I just found it easier if I wanted to check. And I came in this morning, I put it to 12. I measured, I opened up my unit. It was on 12. I recalibrated it anyway, just for the heck of it. So that was very simple to do. The kerf is automatically set. Let's just go to the kerf here. The kerf is automatically set at a one eighth of an inch. So you always have to have some sort of kerf measurement that you're using. I left it at an eighth of an inch. We use carbide blades most of the time. So that worked perfect for me. For me, I make sure that my measurement is set to the bottom of my blade, not the top of my blade. So the only other thing that you would need to do is to check your bump settings. Now there's this whole bunch of preset bump settings. Now for me, I like to do everything in inches. So I made a custom bump setting of seven eighths of an inch. And with the one eighth inch kerf, it becomes to be a one inch. So it works much faster for me when we're making our cants. But if you wanted to cut inch and a half boards, very simply, all you would do would be to move yourself down to inch and a half, hit this go to button. So the next bump session is like I'm making two by fours, you're able to use those measurements. Now he already has presets at one and a half, three and a half, five and a half, seven and a half, because that's pretty much standard lumber. You can make anything you want, create yourself a new one. Me, I did seven eighths because that's mostly what I cut. So when my boards come out of the pile that you're going to see over here, they're actually cut to seven eighths because of the way I've set my blade, set my kerf, set my bump, and that's exactly how I want my stuff. So the installation on this thing, simple as pie. To operate it, simple as pie as well. I like pie. I love pie, Jay. Even easy pie. So right here, right now, we're going to test the accuracy. We're going to make a few slices through this. We're going to see if every one of the boards is the exact same thickness. And I'm going to show you how to use this unit. Now, what I normally do on every cut that we have. So right here, you can see my blade is perfect on top of my cant. What you're going to want to do is to hit your zero button. You want to zero out your cut. So what I'm going to do next is now I want to make my seven eighths of an inch boards or let's call them one inch boards because of my kerf cut. I hit the go to button right now. You can read I'm in a seven eighths inch bump mode. I hit the down button. It's going to come down. It's going to go back up because what it's doing is it's going down and then it's tensioning up the slack in your controller right here. So every time that you actually bump this definitely in the down position, it's going to go down past your cut and then it's going to come back up and you're actually going to see your unit get tight on there. Now I should be right there. I'm not going to measure this until we make the four cuts. So right now, what I want to do is now I'm about ready to make my cut. It's telling me my cut depth is seven eighths of an inch. At this point, you want to zero yourself out again and that I will show you that once we get to the other side of what we do. I'm just going to shut this off between cuts. Normally I would just start a rotation and keep moving. Now we're zeroed out on our nine cut, which is where we're at. What you want to do is you're picking your blade up and what's cool about this right here, I'm an inch and seven sixteenths. So now I know I can start pulling back because my blade is above my first cut. I'm going to bring this unit right back into position and I am going to hit my go to zero button. Now it goes down. It's going to slack itself back up and let's check. So that's your last cut. There you go. Now you see I'm right back where I wanted to be cutting. Now I'm going to hit my go to. I'm going to bump down my seven eighths of an inch. You're going down. It's taking the slack. We're ready to go. I hope. I'm not even going to look. I'm just going to get after it. What I didn't do before I started and I notice a lot of times when I'm actually starting into the mill that I did not put myself back to zero and you can see if you still have a cut depth up here and right now it's reading seven eighths. I want to zero out that cut. I'm going to lift my unit. I'm going to read my numbers. I need to be at least two and a quarter inches above, which there I am. I usually go a little bit higher. Now it seems easy when you have one or two boards. When you have six, seven and eight, this is going to give it to you accurately so that you don't have to think. Now we're going to go back to zero. So we're go to. We're going back to zero. It's doing its thing. Well, I got time for coffee and cake. Let's see how we did right back on my cut. So now I want to go to and I want to bump my mode again. Let it do its thing. Let's make the cut. Didn't hit my zero. So I'm zeroing out my unit. Now I know I've got three boards, so I need to lift myself up over and be at least three. Three and a half is better. Last time. We're going to zero. Let it do its thing. The more boards you have, the more coffee and cake you get. I like cake. I do love cake, Jay. You see how accurate I am right back every time. So now let's bump down. So go to bump down. Let's make the cut. I'm not even looking. Let's make Now normally. Now I do. And I noticed Jay yesterday as well. And I we were just getting used to the unit. I didn't hit my bump, but I still haven't moved my head. So now we can just go zero out our cut again. If you were going to continue to continuously making cuts, that's all that you keep doing is you zero out, you bump down, zero out, bump down, zero out, bump down. I did not look at that ruler once. I don't know from me here using my eye. They look pretty straight. They look pretty flat and they look pretty even to me. That's really nice. We're going to dig in with a ruler. We won't just leave you hanging. And the cool part, this knows exactly what's going on. So at any time I go back to my zero, if I wanted to remake my cut, check these boards, check them out, check them out. So you could see we're not one, we cut perfectly flat boards. We're using our carbide blades, which is going to make life a little bit easier on you. But these boards right here, you can see I'm just under, I'm really at 15, 16. There's one 15, 16. I don't know if that's accurate or not. Hang on. That's pretty impressive. Let's do it again. 15, 16. It's right on the money to the 16th. Can you use your hand crank? Can you read that ruler consistently every time? Now, because we're using carbide blades and our lumber is perfectly flat, our cuts are perfectly flat. Now, if you're using let's here, I'm going to go all the way down. You want to show I am 15, 16 across the entire board. Now, if you're using a dull blade, you're not using good blade. I'm still 15, 16. And your boards are being cut like this. That is not the commander's problem. That's a whole different problem that you got there. So it's all going to be about blade control, how well you cut and your lumber. You've taken the guesswork out of measuring your lumber. You've made it, I want to say automatic. I mean, I'm always skeptical on these things. I will say even with the original motorized crank, ended up loving it. This thing, I was skeptical. This thing is crazy accurate. Loving it. We're thinking that our measurements are good. I mean, here, I cut every one of these boards. I cut and every one of these is hickory. And you're going to see in the next video, this isn't hickory that freshly came down. This is some ridiculously hard dried hickory that we have. Our cuts are perfectly flat. I don't know. I was cutting 7-8 yesterday. So let's see if we're 15, 16. We're right on the money. So it's not just a couple boards I cut for you. This entire stack, that entire stack, that gave me the confidence to just keep going. Now I feel like I'm getting lazy because I'm not hand cranking. I'm not even looking at the rule. You see, I push the button and I just ran the sawmill down. So as far as I'm concerned, there's the test of this. This thing is accurate, accurate to the tee. Here, look, I hit the zero button again. We'll do the last little test. Let's see if it goes there. I'm not going to lie. I can't be that accurate with the hand crank. No, because the old style hand crank, or at least on my woodland mills, I don't know how it is on everybody else's setup. It's got a spot for you to put the, you can't just leave it where you want it to leave. This thing works off of 16ths of an inch. Now your hand crank and your hand crank post did not. Now you would be able to do it with this if your eye is going to be perfect. On our other mill, here, there you go. Look on our other mill. How high is my ruler? So I'm standing four feet away from it. The chance of it being off a 16th of an inch is probably greater than the fact that, hey, I got my boards close. You're going to make your better lumber. You're going to make higher quality lumber. You're going to make lumber that's easier to build stuff with, playing with, because you don't have different thicknesses. Now you still have to make sure that you're cutting flat using good blades, but your measuring system, this is all solved for you now. And Jay doesn't have to do math. Jay doesn't do math. He has a bad enough time remembering the zero, and there's only two buttons you're using on this all the time. So I believe by next week, we're going to have Jay as an expert. He's going to understand the zero. We might even make a sticker for our mill, like we did with our post cutters club. Zero out your cut because this thing's going nowhere. It's going nowhere. I love it. I hate to say it. I'm about ready to order another one from my other mill because both of these bad boys are operational. Mill Max and Maximum Mill. Max your mills. That's right. Okay. The first on our part series on maxing your mill, we showed you the buyer's timber tech, the DRO and set work system, how accurate it is, how it cuts, how to use it, how to install it. Yup. And like everything else, our members and our membership community, you're going to get a discount on this and anything else that this man makes. So I'd like to know from everybody out there, what would be your number one upgrade you want to put on your hobby mill? Because we're going to make a video about it. We're going to find out what is the best unit for you, for what you're looking to do. We're going to show you how to use it. We're going to show you if it gets the thumbs up and then what Jay? Hopefully get a discount. We're going to get a discount because that's how two guys operate. So max your mill guys and make sure buyer's timber tech is where you want to get your commander system. There's going to be a link in the description and yeah, a discount for my members.