Cutting push pins for a sawmill debarker
This photo shows part of the process I used to build a debarker for my sawmill. A debarker is a machine that strips most of the bark off of logs in a sawmill before the logs are rough cut into timbers that will be later sawed or planed into finished dimensional lumber. Most debarkers that I have seen look like two truncated cones (minus the points) facing each other and spin on a common axle. The opposing truncated cones contain teeth that grab the log as they rotate and rip off its bark. A debarker can be mounted in its own building between the mill pond and sawmill, or the debarker can be set up at the front door of a sawmill receiving logs from the log conveyor that fishes them out of the pond.
I decided that push pins had the right shape for the truncated cones of a debarker. As an experiment, I stuck one into the side of my portable wooden bench and sawed through the plastic body until I discovered that the steel pin only goes about halfway into the plastic body. The front bell-shaped item in this photo is the first push pin I sawed. The middle one is the one being sawed. The red one to the rear is there just for visibility in case the white ones didn’t show up very well.
That is a cheap Atlas track saw I’m using: no need for my nicer X-Acto miter saw for this job. I am also holding a plastic N scale tree trunk that I’m comparing with the size of my proposed debarker heads. As it turned out, neither of these worked out properly because I left too much of the central portion of the plastic push pin body. To correct that, I simply cut up and filed two more push pins to the correct contour and mounted them in the debarker frame I build from styrene structural shapes. I left enough of the steel pin to serve as an axle and cut off the excess using rail nippers.
Cutting push pins for a sawmill debarker
This photo shows part of the process I used to build a debarker for my sawmill. A debarker is a machine that strips most of the bark off of logs in a sawmill before the logs are rough cut into timbers that will be later sawed or planed into finished dimensional lumber. Most debarkers that I have seen look like two truncated cones (minus the points) facing each other and spin on a common axle. The opposing truncated cones contain teeth that grab the log as they rotate and rip off its bark. A debarker can be mounted in its own building between the mill pond and sawmill, or the debarker can be set up at the front door of a sawmill receiving logs from the log conveyor that fishes them out of the pond.
I decided that push pins had the right shape for the truncated cones of a debarker. As an experiment, I stuck one into the side of my portable wooden bench and sawed through the plastic body until I discovered that the steel pin only goes about halfway into the plastic body. The front bell-shaped item in this photo is the first push pin I sawed. The middle one is the one being sawed. The red one to the rear is there just for visibility in case the white ones didn’t show up very well.
That is a cheap Atlas track saw I’m using: no need for my nicer X-Acto miter saw for this job. I am also holding a plastic N scale tree trunk that I’m comparing with the size of my proposed debarker heads. As it turned out, neither of these worked out properly because I left too much of the central portion of the plastic push pin body. To correct that, I simply cut up and filed two more push pins to the correct contour and mounted them in the debarker frame I build from styrene structural shapes. I left enough of the steel pin to serve as an axle and cut off the excess using rail nippers.