Why we bought a sawmill...

We live outside of Valtimo in a very wild and rural part of Finland. The nearest town is Nurmes, where we can get everything we need for everyday life. It's also home to the region's only hardware stores, which are comparable to a small do-it-yourself shop for hobbyists and gardeners. You can get a lot, but everything comes at a price and the selection is limited. Organic and natural products are rare. I don't want to belittle these stores in any way, but sometimes it's difficult to find exactly what you need. The nearest larger towns with large hardware stores and a wide selection are Kajaani (1 hour), Kuopio (1.5 hours), and Joensuu (2 hours). Then there's the transport.

We need a lot of wood at the moment for fences, the greenhouse, smaller building projects, repairs to the mökki, etc. and that quickly becomes very expensive. In permaculture, you like to see what you have available and how you can use these resources. Since this property has a lot of forest and we have the basic equipment and knowledge to fell and transport trees, we wanted to use this to save on expensive lumber and transport costs. We also liked the idea of building everything with wood from the immediate area. We spent a lot of time thinking about which device or machine would help us best. First, we looked at sawmills that only cut boards with a chainsaw, but then we realized that this probably wouldn't be enough and somehow it was too complicated for us. In the end, we decided on the Frontier OS23 from Norwood. A sawmill that can be installed as a stationary unit or on a trailer. When we placed the order, customer service contacted us to say that this machine was no longer available, but that they would offer us an OS27 for the same price, which has a more powerful motor and wider tracks. Of course, we immediately accepted. We also ordered a carriage extension to cut logs up to 5.5 m long. While installing it on a trailer would have been extremely practical, it was ultimately just too expensive for us. The machine already cost around €4,000, and our budget is quite limited.

When the huge package finally arrived and we decided on a location for the installation, we had to build a small canopy. This protects the machine from rain and snow. The snow came down pretty quickly, and we used old wood from a demolished shed, so the canopy isn't our prettiest work. We'll fix that at some point.

After assembly and initial test logs, a few quality defects became apparent, which we reported to the seller and the manufacturer. Unfortunately, they showed little concern, and we waited almost a year for compensation or a replacement. I would consider this a major negative, even though the product itself isn't to blame.

For example, the paintwork was of very poor quality and we had to respray the parts. Plastic levers broke practically after the first use, the seal on the water tank started leaking pretty quickly, the drive belt cracked after just a few hours, etc. After more than a year, we were sent parts we already had and spare parts we will never need. The only useful things were a couple of saw blades. What a shame... The machine's functionality was never actually limited by the defects. We had problems with wavy cuts in the wood for a long time, but after cutting many, many tree trunks, we have more or less got the problem under control. We modified the cleaning pads for the rails, replaced some of the broken handles, and found a way to sharpen the saw blades ourselves, even if they aren't perfect and we'll probably have to change them more often than normal. We've now built a greenhouse and many, many meters of fence with the wood we cut ourselves. Most of the wood for the mökki has also been cut to size and is drying out. The wood for the mökki alone saved us about €8,000. It must be said, however, that it's a lot of work to go from tree to board or beam. Cutting trees, delimbing, pulling them from the forest, transporting them, trimming them, storing and drying them, planing them, cutting them, and installing them. This also allows us to handle the wood more carefully, saving leftovers and trying to use as much as possible when cutting them.

We would definitely buy a machine like this again in a heartbeat. Maybe a different model, maybe even from a different seller. Overall, we're very grateful for this machine, and I think it will be of great use to us in the future. Simply because we can cut things that you can't buy in stores.