Tourguide Jonge Schaap

Wood sawmill, 2007

The Young Sheep

1. This mill saws trees and beams into planks and slats. We start this story with a felled tree.You can’t saw those right away because they contain too many sugars and starch, so they lie in water for a considerable time. This makes the quality of the wood much better. Not all wood floats, because elms and oaks sink and stay there for at least six to eight years.

2. Before sawing, we drag the tree trunk up the slope and there we peel the bark off. The bark usually contains a lot of dirt and sand.

3. With a winding spool driven by the windmill, we drag the log inside. There we put it on the saw-carriage and tie it securely.

4. Now we need to adjust the saw frame. You can change the distance between the different saws by placing wooden bobbins between them. Such a bobbin determines the thickness of the shelf to be sawn. On the wall you can see our stock of saw-thickness bobbins.

5. The saws only saw in the downward movement, upward has no effect. So the log has to be pulled forward a millimetre each time in order to saw. That’s what the scribble wheel does for us. A pallet drops one tooth further each time. We can saw logs of up to 14 metres here.

6. How can those saws go up and down. That’s an invention from about 1597. That crankshaft serves 3 saw frames and sits 2 floors up. A crankshaft converts a circular motion into an up-and-down motion. Those saw frames are driven by wooden gears by the main shaft connected to the large gear-wheel in the cap of the mill.

7. Around that large “main gear and brake wheel” are wooden brake shoes to stop the mill. That brake can be operated by a rope hanging above the gallery.

8. Here on the gallery we have a winch to point the cap with the sails to the wind. The brake rope hangs here and the second rope is for an additional brake lock.

9. Wind is variable, at low wind we hang sails on the wings so they catch more wind. In summer the sails are 2 x red and 2x white, in winter all 4 are brown.

Also take a look at our Youtube video about this mill.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aiLP2boMpBs