 Pretty much everything we use today comes with some level of production, extraction, and refinement. For most of history, this had to be done by hand and made most items pretty expensive and labor intensive. But today we can buy so many things for a very cheap price. Do you ever wonder how we got to where we are now? In this video, I'm going to explore one of the early human technologies that first helped reduce the cost of labor and make things a bit cheaper. Using some inspiration from inventor Leonardo da Vinci, I'm going to attempt to build a water powered machine that will automatically mill a log using just the power of water. So let's try and build this machine and see if it'll actually work and make my first baby step towards my own industrial revolution. Milling wood is a lot of work and I did my own video on this to kind of explore and just see just how difficult it was. Needless to say, it was a bit exhausting and slow. So it's not that much of a surprise that some of the first industrialized machines were for the purpose of milling wood. Historically, a few versions have existed throughout time. Mine, I'm going to take a little bit of inspiration from inventor Leonardo da Vinci, who drew a rough sketch of a design in 1478. The drawing is pretty rough and it's believed to actually be based on some earlier drawings by some other artists, but does provide the inspiration for a pretty sophisticated sawmill. And this is going to be basically five components to it. First up is water wheel, which will provide the actual force to the machine. Second is going to be a support structure, which basically going to hold the saw and everything up above the wheel so we can have mechanisms below it. Then there's going to be the actual saw, which is in a frame, and then the track that slides up and down. Below that is then going to be a crank mechanism, which turns the rotational force of the water wheel into a reciprocating motion to bring the saw up and down. This is going to be a sled that the wood sits on and that is slowly pulled through. And to actually pull it is going to be a ratcheting system to slowly pull the cart bit by bit through the saw. At this point, I've been able to do a few projects and knock out a few parts of this. Most notably is the water wheel, which I did in a previous video. So that's pretty much ready to go. Compared to his design, my wheel is a lot bigger and it is actually an overshot rather than an undershot. I think this should all give me some advantages with power. Then another piece I already have, which is actually the very first project in this series of making a sawmill, and that is the saw blade that we forged before and then built into a frame. So that gives us a nice starting point with the wheel and the saw frame. So next up, we just got to build a main support structure, which will be kind of the skeleton of this. We'll try to wheel to it, set that up as the main structure, and hopefully we can get this thing to work. We have a little bit of new technology that we recently unlocked. Thanks to some help from new assistants I have with Elliot and Theo, we were able to build a nail header and that allows us to mass produce nails a little bit quicker. And thanks to that, Mario, to get a nice supply of nails to use to help hold everything together. So we have kind of a rough layout of the wood for the frame here. And basically what I'm making is more or less a bed frame. So we have the legs here and elevate to the right floor. And we're going to have an outer frame here to get this really secure. So we don't need to brace it too much with what I'm going to use some joinery in combination with nails, rather than just straight nailing. And that should give us a tighter fit and hopefully something pretty solid that we can stand on and work on. So what I'm going to try and do is called a castle joint, which is often used in furniture, which seems fitting for this. I have basically cut three different joints to form a corner at each one. And it should produce a really strong hold and should hopefully get a pretty strong result. All right, so we have all the joinery cut for all of these little wood here. So everything should hopefully, in theory, snap together and form a pretty strong base. We have the castle joints here. These will intersect each other. And then we have legs, the four points, and that will insert into there. We should have a pretty strong platform to hold it all together. We've got some nails we can throw in there to really hold it up, maybe even throw a little bit of glue. Some small four inch shafts. One end we have upset, so it's a little bit larger diameter than the rest of the shaft. On the other end we drew out into a small nub. So the idea is we've made a bunch of these little washers here, washers, second washer, and then we can bend over this nub and lock everything in place. We'll see how it works. First, thank you to the sponsor of today's video, the brand new Salon Core Space One. When it comes to the projects I make, it involves a lot of slow and sometimes particularly handy work, usually with some loud noises from smithing or woodworking. Lately I've gotten hooked on listening to audiobooks while I work to help pass the time, and if I'm going to listen to something I need to be able to filter out all the noise around me so I can hear the actual book. So I really appreciate a good pair of noise cancelling headphones. Salon Core sent me a pair of their brand new Space One headphones, and I'm pretty impressed. The Space One adapts to your environment with adaptive noise cancelling. This advanced tech detects external sounds and sound leakage, automatically fine-tuning the noise reduction for optimal performance, even if you don't have a perfect seal around your ears. The Space One is engineered with an upgraded noise cancelling structure that knocks out any outside voices, like people chatting or babies crying, and does it even better than the closest competitors, which is great if you're stuck on a plane and just want to focus on your latest audiobook. To add just under a hundred bucks, it's a great bargain, and if you want to stop hearing that outside noise, and just focus on what you actually want to hear. So check it out. It's a Soundcore Space One. All right, so we got this all rigged up for the crank now. It took a little bit of jerry rigging to get extra braces for the axle. I think we should be pretty much set to give it a little test run. Took a lot of tinkering to get everything to just kind of align just right, but at this point it should spin and push up, uh-oh, and then back down. An axle that runs through the entire frame of the device. We've got our ratchet in place, and then we're essentially just going to assemble everything into a basic fulcrum. So we start with our long arm here, and we have a pivot here, and then the drop arm, and like that, and the idea is that the arm will come down, and just very slowly increment the ratchet. We just did a test run of it without a log in there, and everything looks to be going pretty good. We have some small issues that could potentially be a problem. We had to add this little kind of lock on the ratchet, just so it doesn't back spin. There's a little bit of play with the wheel, the lock, but I think once we get it pretty good, it might require a little babysitting, but for the most part it seems to be working. We tried to mostly use wood components, which is pretty historical, but there are some parts we might eventually find we need to redo in metal. Everything actually works pretty good. It's honestly pretty surprising for kind of simple design, but it's like complicated enough that's actually kind of impressive, I think. It might be a little bit of fine-tuning, but I think we pretty much got it here. So just put a log in there and see what happens. Suspense is killing me. Once the log finally reached the saw, everything seemed to run smoothly. Overall, the cutting was a lot slower than I expected, but they saw slowly made progress through the wood. I think optimizing the speed and rate of cutting is something that can only be done with a fair amount of tweaking to the design, trying to get just the right amount of tension on the cutting surface, versus putting too much pressure on it and causing it to bind. Making all these tweaks is probably only going to be possible when it's fully running, and however, the largest challenge turned out to be the components I didn't build. The water pump that simulated our power source, a rushing river, proved to be difficult to keep running with a consistent flow. Leaves and other debris kept clogging it, slowing down the flow, or straight up stopping the water. It was a bit chaotic trying to clear it, get the flow back up and running, and ultimately the pump ended up burning itself out in the process. So ultimately the machine ended up running pretty slow, not the most efficient, and my river kind of ended up breaking. But all things considered, I think I would call this a success. We've been able to put together a relatively complex machine based on just a rough sketch from several centuries ago by DaVinci, and all the components actually work. It's a little disappointing that the whole river ended up breaking down before we could finish the log. It did progress enough that we were able to tell that it is working. While it is running pretty slow, and it would probably take a while to actually saw the full log, the main advantage with the sawmill is that you're not really wearing yourself out. If you were to do it by hand, you could probably do it quicker, but you're going to get tired and not be able to do it all day. Here with the sawmill, you can just run this thing continuously instead of going to get tired. So ideally we hopefully can speed it up. And I think that's just kind of the relationship of the different components of the ratcheting wheel and how fast it pushes it through and how much pressure and how fast the saw can go. So I think the issues with the speed are probably more just based on the interpretations of the drawing that I did. I think just of tweaking, we could actually get it to work pretty good. And the issue with the river kind of basically running dry is actually probably kind of fitting because a lot of river sources would be seasonal. And the best time to basically run your mill would be in the spring when a bunch of snow melts and you get a really strong flow. Right now we're entering into fall after a bit of a drought. If this was set up for real, I likely wouldn't be able to run it now anyways. That being said, I did design the water wheel to fit onto a trailer so that potentially could move it to a water source and get it running. Actually finding one where it can actually transport it and put it there is easier said than done. So it's going to be an ongoing search and it might end up being something that I can only do in the spring at a certain location. So the hope is at some point to get this actually plugged into a real river. You're going to have to do some tweaking and redesigning to try and find a better way to simulate the water. And hopefully you can get a little bit more consistent and long running result to actually mill some logs. Very impressed with this result. This is a surprisingly complex machine. Very much the largest project I've built and the fact that runs as well as it does is just kind of fascinating. It's both simple and complex. So it's definitely a really interesting topic to explore and I hope to make some more industrial machines pretty soon and see how advanced we can get with this. Thank you again to all my supporters on Patreon. Without you guys doing these more long-term projects wouldn't be possible. So thanks again and thanks for watching.