Kerfs and Miscuts on the Sawmill

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Kerfs and Miscuts.

Now that the clamping system has been installed and working fine our next tackle was the problem of proper kerf setting and thickness miscuts. Sure the scale that comes with the Oscar 36 is fine and works well enough. But we needed something a little more fool proof for the both of us. Me, more than Kat.

On one of my many machine retrofits I had performed in the past, I had the opportunity to haul off a used piece of equipment my client did not want. It was a DRO with encoders. DRO stands for Digital Read Out. This is simply a LED display that shows the position of the blade height in relation to the track or deck height.

The encoder is mounted to the center of the lift shaft on the Oscar 36 and is then programmed with the proper parameters to read the blade height. What has worked out so well for us, is that the DRO allows you to set a kerf for so many inches traveled.

What does this mean? It now allows us to accurately cut lumber with a tolerance of +/- 1/32 of an inch. I have taken to measuring thickness with a dial caliper and not a flat tape measure. It has also allowed us to begin cutting some very thin and fine veneer pieces from the Southern Yellow Pine and White Oak logs we are milling.

I did a quick search on Ebay and found many listings under "DRO" . So if this little gem of a display goes out it shouldn't be too expensive to replace it.

Next Article: Cable drive and sore pushbutton fingers.
Oscar now moves forward, up and back to home by his self.