 Previously I attempted to recreate a water powered sawmill designed by Leonardo da Vinci from 500 years ago. Da Vinci is famous for his many designs and sketches of various machines, weapons and mechanisms, some of which predicted inventions yet to happen centuries in the future. But drawing a rough sketch machine that can work in theory and then turning it into a mechanism that runs continuously and smoothly is a whole other challenge. At the end of my previous sawmill video I was able to establish a basic proof of concept that Da Vinci's design worked and the water powered sawmill would cut, but in the end we only achieved a few inches of cut lumber before my artificial river ended up breaking. In this video I'm going to explore the difficult process of trying to turn this concept from theory to practical reality and troubleshoot all the problems with the mill until I can successfully achieve a complete cut piece of lumber. That's the best way to figure out how to make a working sawmill is to visit a working sawmill. So I did that. I actually did this a few years ago when on a way on vacation I was able to just barely catch the end of the demonstration of a working water powered sawmill near Mackinac, Michigan. Comparing this working mill to the recreation that I built there are a lot of very obvious similarities. The rough idea is basically the same, reciprocating saw blade attached to a wheel, this spun by water, which also pushes a ratcheting system on a sled to slowly draw the log through the saw. But there are also some distinct differences. The largest difference is probably that they have an actual real water source, a damned upstream, which they can control how much water is in released and when they open it up a ton of water comes flowing through spinning their wheel like crazy. They have a little bit different design of a water wheel which provides a much higher spin to theirs and it's connected to a vertical axis with a geared connection to the actual saw. Their saw is huge compared to mine and has a large, distinctively shaped hooked teeth. When powered it is quite fast and forceful owing to all the water flow they have at their disposal. The ratcheting system is a bit more complex than mine with much finer ratcheting teeth and the lumber sled is fully enclosed so it can't bounce up and down. My favorite part is the placard about the designer of the mill who was able to take off and just go fishing while the mill did all of the work for him. Which really drives home the whole point of this technology, freeing yourself from hours of manual labor. So obviously a lot of that I won't quite be able to implement but I can at least apply a few changes based on what I saw. Plus I got a lot of helpful suggestions from the comments in my previous video and I can go through and try and implement at least some of these. However the especially challenging part of this next step is that it's going to be against a bit of a deadline. This fall has been unusually warm so far but winter is quickly coming and I live in Minnesota where things are about to get very cold and frozen before you know it. So the challenge here is to get things up and running before the weather turns too cold and freezes us out. Let's see if we can get this log cut. So we made a few improvements to try and get this sawmill working a little bit better. We added three times as many paddles to it which I think will allow it to get a little bit more consistent of a spin hopefully. We added some kind of splash guards to try and retain some of the water that splashes out. Then we built the giant water tower and now we have two pumps that are pumping the water up there at the same time and hopefully that will provide enough flow. Now we're kind of dependent on the volume in there. If it gets too low the pressure drops and we lose amount of speed and torque our wheel is going to have but hopefully the pumps will keep it pretty consistently filled, be a little bit of balancing act there. We swapped out the blade with one that's a little bit thinner and more of the right profile if we're cutting like this should hopefully cut a little bit better at least. Also has more chance of it binding though because it's thinner. We had this middle joint here, the little bar that broke previously is made out of wood so that's now metal. A few of the joints here are redone and metal and we thickened up some of the wheels so it stays on the track a little bit better. We just have a ratchet on here for now. Eventually we want to figure out the dog system for holding it in. Just for testing purposes we have the ratchet on there so we can get in nice and tight. I think we're looking pretty good to doing some more test runs and hopefully we can have some success. I think we're going to do it without the ratchet system first. Figure out the cutting and how much pressure we actually need to put on there and then figure out how to time it with the ratcheting so it isn't going too fast or too slow and we're just getting a good consistent cut. So we'll turn it on. Let's see what happens. This video is sponsored by Trade Coffee. Trade connects you to the best coffee from the nation's top roasters and delivers them right to your door. Maybe you prefer the dark savory notes of chocolate and marshmallows or the bright pick-me-up of a light roast. You can now find out with Trade Coffee. 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All right so we're on a second or third day now trying to get this to work and ended up foregoing the water tower. Ended up causing more difficulties just because the rate of flow would change as the volume of water in it would have different amount of pressure so we have to kind of adjust as we go and it all just seemed to come down to the same problem of getting a consistent flow of water back in there as fast as we are using it. We also had trouble getting it up that high so lowering it a little bit lower and going directly into the spout again made things a little bit better. So we have two pumps now going empowering it. We've been able to get a pretty consistent flow and with all the kind of splash guards. We're still losing some water but we are pretty good supply. I think the first time we did this it ran itself out less than an hour and you just basically refill it from all water splashing everywhere. So we got a pretty consistent flow of the river. It does seem to struggle at some points that maybe another third pump might help overcome and add a little bit more torque. We'll be on that. We've been sawing pretty much most of the day and it's been very simple. We don't really have to babysit it anymore. We got a pretty decent flow but a few issues that came up and not having much success with the ratchet and we went to a weight system and trying to get the right amount of weight and pull on it keep it advancing and cutting at a decent speed is the real challenge. Kind of check up on it every once in a while and give it a little push but if you push just a little too hard it'll bind up and the wheel will stop, the cart will lift up and I'll have a lot of issues. We're able to get an inch in 10 minutes. It's still pretty slow and it's a pretty slow process. Still have a lot of issues to still work out. The saw blade is cutting a little bit crooked. I think it's just not enough tension holding it tight so maybe to add like a threaded rod or something to be able to really crank it tight. Unfortunately because the saw blade does not go full frame we weren't able to put wedges in there to hold it extra tight. So we have a little bit of a drift to the cut unfortunately which I was not expecting with the saw mill. I thought it would actually be just default to straight but I guess kind of the same issues you're going to do by hand you run into with the saw mill. We're making a lot more progress but it's still very slow. To help improve the straightness of the cut and hopefully improve our cutting speed I ground a new saw blade based on the saw blade I saw in Michigan which is overall just a lot thicker. This blade is a lot more aggressive. Hopefully I can capture enough torque to fully utilize it. I think it's sharp. Test run here and got a lot of resistance I think it's because the saw blade is slightly offset from the frame so it's pulling it too far over. So what we did is we added a second frame on the outside of the track to kind of balance the tension between two frames so that should keep the top and bottom pieces more in line with the track and not twisted so hopefully we can have some success now. So we'll turn the river on and see what happens. It's a lot better. Think that did it? Pulling it in. Touching now a little bit of resistance. Good so far for a little bit more resistance. The new saw seemed to work a lot better but was still struggling with getting enough water flow to power it without things binding. So we might just take a couple more tweaks and we can get this thing running. We may have over-watered your lawn a little. Oh my dirt. The last few improvements I made to the saw now seem to make kind of the biggest difference. I ended up swapping it out with a much larger blade and I don't know if the teeth made a huge difference but I think the thickness of the actual blade definitely made it go a lot straighter. That in combination with a system of using threaded bolts that I could tighten that has really made it just cut perfectly straight which is something I couldn't even do by hand. And then one of the other things I did I just bought like another fourth pump to just push this over the edge. This one's even stronger than the rest and then kind of came up with a better system of preventing clogs. So you're able to run it a lot better without any issue. But there is still kind of a balancing issue. I ran into a lot with this. They're just getting just the right amount of torque because you want it to cut as fast as possible and just put just enough pressure on the actual log. But if you push it a little too much then things start to break. The most frequent place that it breaks is the shear pin which connects the axle to the water wheel. And I swapped it out with a few different metals and bolts. They either snap or they just wrap all the way around the axle. Eventually put it in with some hardened tool steel and that so far seems to be holding up pretty well. And in the end it took about six hours to cut the full cut. That's when you subtract all the breakages and fixing and tweaking which overall is not that bad. It's definitely slower than doing it by hand. We did a three man team to hand cut a saw swapping out with each other. That took us three hours. So it's about half the speed as a three man team. But when you factor in how many man hours that actually is it's a bit different. That's three hours times three people versus six hours times zero people. So it's still a little bit of experiment to find the right amount of tension to put on it. The weight system right now seems to work pretty good. It's easy to adjust. Never really got the ratchet system to work perfectly. It always just seemed to just put too much pressure, bind it up and cause it to break. It took over a month now of just tweaking again and again and again to try and get things working. I think with more water and more force we could definitely get this up to be faster than a hand saw. Every cut after that when cutting the lumber should go quicker like it did when I did it by hand just because there's less material. So there's a lot of expenses this very first cut that we did. All park it was 126 hours of labor between three people to build the sawmill. And then it was probably 48 hours of tweaking to get it running smoothly as it is now. And then let's say roughly $500 worth of materials to build everything. All the wood, all the nails and the metal for that. The axles. It's about two grand to get that very first cut to the sawmill. But the second cut will be pretty much free. So our backup plan if we couldn't get a river to actually flow and power this was maybe do something really drastic. A lot of people suggested we build this giant human powered hamster wheel to power it. And fortunately we didn't have to do that because that would take a lot of work to build one of those. So good thing we didn't have to do that. But anyways that's actually going to be a video coming up here pretty soon. Uh-oh. It's very satisfying to get this very initial step to the industrial revolution. Hopefully we can get to the steam age here and not too long. So thanks again for watching. Thank you to all my supporters on Patreon. See you later.