Homemade saw mill for $200

His Sawmill 2.0 – A homemade swing blade type sawmill

I’m a big fan of this guy Jamie that lives off the grid in the woods of Vermont. I stumbled upon his YouTube channel somehow and saw him doing all kinds of awesome stuff all with little to no resources. He’s a mad scientist of sorts as his 276 YouTube videos will attest.

He makes saw mills, giant robots, geodesic domes to live in, banana buildings and many other things on his 25 off the grid acres. He even cut in a road 3/4 of a mile by hand! For years he just walked to his property from the side of the freeway since it has no road access.

He builds 2 types of homemade DIY sawmills with scraps he has around his compound. One is a band saw mill and the other is a swing blade saw mill made from a 12″ saw blade. I wonder if he could get a bigger motor and blade if it would be more efficient? It all comes down to money I suppose.

Sawmill 1.0 a homemade bandsaw type sawmill


Here’s me at my buddies fancy WoodMizer saw mill on Vashon Island. We traded him some Crown Royal to cut 3 4×8″ beams for our cabin foundation. This mill was amazing. It ran of a turbo diesel motor and was all automated. He could flip the logs for each cut as much as he wanted from the controls. Also he could dial in the exact cut depth with lasers and digital controls via this wireless remote. It was impressive! The mill came on a trailer but he had it setup so perfect and level, he said it would never move.

For our needs closer to the cabin, we’ve been using an Alaskan chainsaw mill. It’s much slower, but we only need a few slabs and beams cut per year. We can’t justify the cost of a bigger woodmizer or other band saw mill yet. In the future when we expand the cabin and build some other outbuildings we’ll probably hire a mill to come to our property and mill our own lumber. For that we’d need to plan ahead and stack up some dry logs ready to mill.



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4 Responses

  1. Jamies videos are above, check out his youtube channel.

  2. john says:

    would like to take a look. where do i find this guy?

  3. Glad you like him as much as I do. My wife teases me when I watch his videos but they are truly awesome. He show what you can do with so little if you really want it. People love him so much they send him parts for projects and even a new HD camera to keep filming since the quality was so bad in most of the videos. I don’t mind it actually but the new ones are crystal clear.

    I remember how I found him now, he has 8 videos where he builds a log cabin for a friend in Alaska in a week with nothing but hand tools and a chain saw. That 8 days included the shopping trip for everything they needed.

  4. Grant Wagner says:

    This guy is freakin’ Awesome! Now I gotta watch all of his videos. There is another few hours of my life gone.