1st September 2026
Sometimes I am ashamed of myself. when I drive home after a day with John, where it’s been a bit challenging, and I have showed my frustration, I feel bad.
Today we wanted to test the sawmill after all the work that was done, I wanted to see if it was working.
I had reminded his wife, when I called her checking if John was okay for today, to see if John had any hydraulic fluid in his garage, John kept forgetting to check.
Anyway once I got down to his house he had stacked up out side containers that I thought were the fluid we needed. When I checked them I round them to be engine oil. I loaded them into the truck and set off for the barn.
Once there I set about sucking out the bad stuff we filled the tank with a couple of weeks ago. I had bought a large syringe to do that job.
And it worked well. I then tackled John about using the engine oil in the tank. He insisted that his son had told him that it would be okay to use it. Still uncertain, it went against everything I knew about hydraulics.
Against my better judgment I did it anyway.
Now I wanted him to start the thing up, and that is where my frustration started. He had to find the key. After many minutes, and a handful of different keys, he found the correct one.
He turned it over, many times without it firing.
I asked him if there was a throttle or choke, he didn’t seem to know what I was talking about.
He kept talking about the key, and maybe there was a different key. I told him firmly that it was nothing to do with the bloody key.
I climbed on the saw to trace the fuel lines trying to understand the configuration. I located what looked like a choke cable, and instructed John to turn it over. This time it fired up, now I wanted to know if the saw worked. That was another confusing time. All I wanted to know was how did you turn on the saw blade. He kept saying that he wanted to change the blade, and despite telling him that it didn’t matter, he trotted off to find a new blade. In the mean time I had to work out how to remove the old one. By a series of elimination I found the lever that released the tension from the blade, now it was a matter of removing a couple of guards and removing the old blade. The new one was fitter, but I was no better off trying to get it to move. In the end a call to Bob at Woodmizer cleared it up. I missed there was a long lever with a black knob on the end, I had to pull it down and the whole engine moved to engage the blade drive motor, so I learned something else today.
That is when I gave up, it was unbearably humid, my eyes were stinging with the sweat from my brow, and I had enough. Next week I will buy the bloody hydronic fluid myself.
We did a bit of clearing up and then headed back, I hope next week will be more successful.
