How I resaw rough cut sawmill lumber into high quality dimensional boards.
At BSR Sawmill, I was fortunate and lucky enough beyond belief to be given a Powermatic 2415 bandsaw. It has a 24 inch table and a throat of 15 inches. This means that if you want to resaw a piece of wood it can cut 15 inches deep. This model has a 5 horse motor that is 3 phase. It weighs in at about 1300 lbs!
Typical power in a home is single phase. Even if it is 220 it is still considered single phase. Three phase is an industrial type of electricity. I don’t have 3 phase at my house so what to do? This is a big problem ordinarily.
Sometime back I was given a MEP 002a military surplus generator. It needed some work but it was a generator. I thought maybe I would use the motor to power my sawmill. Instead, I found another motor for the sawmill. So I fixed the gen-set for a backup power unit at my shop and house.
This is a big generator. It weighs about 900 lbs. I put a trailer underneath it to make it mobile. The MEP002a is able to generate 110, 220 or 3 phase. It is a very diverse gen-set with lots of control over fine tuning the power.
It is a air-cooled, diesel powered, 2 cylinder Onan motor. When the MEP-002 powers up the 2415 it only goes to about 25% of power output at 5 hp. It can really put out some power.
I have been using this to resaw some of the lumber I cut with my sawmill. It will easily cut thick lumber into 2X4’s. When cutting through pine, you don’t even begin to bog it down. It chews it up faster than you can push it through the saw.
The 2415 really needs a vacuum system to keep the sawdust from filling up the base. Doesn’t take long at all to fill with sawdust.