Tool, I mean this respectfully, but you need to log a few thou board feet on your new mill and then it will be apparent that in fact the opposite is true. With these smaller HP mills you NEED the feed rate to be variable to get high production AND quality. Its real easy to push these smaller mills to the point that the blade falls out of its optimum speed and starts to produce low value product. Knots, grain patterns, taper in the log, etc. all factor in here. That is why you will see a lot of the smaller mills running at a lower feed rate then what they actually could be sawing at with an experienced operator manually feeding it. Wood is rarely uniform, and some species will really be more of a handful than others in terms of optimum feed rates.
In the larger HP ranges, power feed becomes a necessity.
Coal,
No disrespect taken, and I hope you don't take this to be that way as it is meant to be respectful in the same regard.
First of all, I will not be doing production work in most cases on my sawmill. I bought the sawmill to mill material for building my house, garage, BBQ building, etc...and I believe what I got will do me fine.
You have 1 year logged on your mill, and I'm sure that helps you understand that one mill pretty well, but there are folks that have many hours logged on all types of mills, and the craftsman/mentor who I'm working with is one such person, he's owned 5 or 6 mills in his life and has tens of thousands of logs racked up with hundreds of custom handcrafted log homes to back it up (some of the finest in the industry). Albeit, the work is different, he sells off a lot of milled timber from his yard on a regular basis. He didn't need to have a millwright come out and set his mill up for him, he adjusts and sets it up all the time, since a bump with the loader will knock it out of wack.
By saying that small mills cannot gain from power feed is really fooling yourself. There are a lot of factors which determine that, and the feed rate is only one of them. The wood, grain, knots, moisture content will all come into play in how one can feed the cut. Power feed has a control for that very reason, that you can speed it up and slow it down. Ted's LT-15 only has the 15HP engine on it, but I believe it will still be able to take advantage of the power feed, even if he needs to slow it down, and it will boost his productivity from where it is by manually cranking the rope/handle. I know that right about now you are thinking I'm full of poo, since you have so much more experience on the LumberMate than I do, and so be it. This is not really rocket science and I do have quite a few board feet under my belt on my vertical band saw and table saw at home, so it's not as if I am totally new to cutting wood. In fact, I would be willing to bet that although I don't have as much time on a LumberMate as yourself, I probably have many more hours logged in working wood both with hand and power tools, and there is even a possibility I understand grain direction and wood movement better than you do as I have studied that for more than a year.
I'm a firm believer that there is no one better sawmill in the smaller ones, most all of them fill a purpose as the others do, and most all of them can perform well for most situations that people like you, me, Ted, and others will use them in. It's really not an either or, and there are situations where power feed will definitely make sense. I could use one of 6 different sawmills and do adequate work for my needs, and I think that you could as well. Again, it's not an either or situation.
