# Automated milling and joinery



## BobL (Apr 29, 2010)

I've been traveling around Italy with SWMBO and the other day we visited a small business called RC Legno that operates out of a valley in the northern Italian Alps.







I don't know how they get any work done because the view from their front gate is this.





The company is owned by two of my cousins and they build structures in wood ranging from small mountain huts like the one shown below, to whole houses or even a 500,000 sq ft warehouses mostly in wood. They even built their own factory - check out the size of the laminated beams.





The small mountain huts are taken by truck as close as they can get to the location and then helicoptered into the final location. When their business was smaller and they could not afford the helicopters they would mountain climd to the location and set up a steel cable lift system to lift the timber packs to the location.

Their main business is laminated beams and house and larger building roof replacements. In this area many building walls are built from stone or rock up to 2ft mm thick and last for hundreds of years. However the rooves need to be replaced every 100 years or so. 

The heart of the business is the office where the designs are drawn up in a special CAD program at the level of every joint and bolt hole.





This is the design for a whole house in wood


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## BobL (Apr 29, 2010)

*Automated milling and joinery part 2*

The designs are then sent down to the half million dollar milling and joinery machine shown here.





This machine can handle billets of wood with a cross section up to 2ft x 2ft mm, and 40 ft long and mill and resaw and create the beams and cladding, complete with joints and major bolt holes as required, for a complete cabin or roof or whatever. They have a huge warehouse full of timber in another location.





The machine can automatically tongue and groove all the cladding as required. However, since the milling and finishing planing is relatively slow, they usually feed the machine with preplaned 40 ft lengths of laminated lengths with the required cross sectional dimensions and it does the rest. It also optimizes the lengths it needs to cut from the remaining lengths to minimize waste.

The heart of the machine is a circular saw that rises from underneath the beam(s) to make up to a 12" deep cut. Because the timber billets can be automatically rolled over by the machine and accurately repositioned at the previous cut it can make a 24" deep cut if it needs to. Alongside the saw is a double sided 3D robotic cutting wheel up to 12" in diameter and 6" wide that can plane or rout various profiles, alongside that is a set of drills that can make holes up to 2" diam at any angle through the wood. It is absolutely fascinating to watch

Here is half a pack for a house roof.





Here is some details showing the angled blind dovetails it can cut.





Sometimes the roof sections are preassembled on the ground so onsite assembly is very quick and a team of 4 people with a crane can replace the roof on a house in about 2 days.

Other machines of interest on site are a bandsaw that can resaw to 24" wide, several very large thicknessers including one that will plane all 4 sides at once, several large sanders and an interesting machine to distress timber to give it a rustic look. They also use lots of small chainsaws to precut large beams and do a bit of chainsaw carving as well.


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## BobL (Apr 29, 2010)

*Part III*

Here is their latest project. 





It's an 85 ft long single span covered wooden bridge. 





The main support is provided by the 2 full length curved (85 ft long) laminated side members which are 12" thick and 3 ft high.





Here is the setting for the bridge.





And some detail.


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## BobL (Apr 29, 2010)

Along the sides of the bridge will be suspended these wooden flower boxes - these were also carved automatically by the machine and then assembled by hand.





When they replace old rooves they usually keep some of the oldest dates carved on the previous roof to see if their roof outlasts the previous one.





All of sawdust generated by the machines are fed into a hopper like this.





And fed to a furnace which they use to heat the factory in winter.





Waste wood and old rooves and wood are chipped and recycled through the furnace and the heat also supplies other factory units shown in the background here - they also built all the rooves of those factories.





It was a fascinating visit and I wish I had taken more and clearer photos of the machine itself operating although much of its operation is hidden. I have taken a small not very clear movie which I will post on you tube.


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## Cowboy Billy (Apr 29, 2010)

Wow awesome Bob

I love the bridge!!!! I could use a 24 foot one at my place!!!

Billy


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## mtngun (Apr 29, 2010)

Impressive technology.


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## RPM (Apr 29, 2010)

Where are they importing their wood from? Some of those beams looked like Douglas-fir?

Nice work .. nice views ... nice trip!


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## smokinj (Apr 29, 2010)

Very slick op.


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## deeker (Apr 29, 2010)

I am VERY impressed!!!!


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## demographic (Apr 29, 2010)

Great stuff, thanks for posting it,


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## huskyhank (Apr 29, 2010)

WOW!

Thanks for showing this!


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## stipes (Apr 29, 2010)

*Nice Bob!!!*

Thanks for the pics!!! Looks like they have a great setup there....


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## mtngun (Apr 29, 2010)

RPM said:


> Where are they importing their wood from? Some of those beams looked like Douglas-fir?


The same thought crossed my mind.

Well, we know a lot of the PNW's doug goes to Asia. It's hard to believe that it would be cost effective to ship it all the way to Italy,though. 

Russia, Finland, Sweden, Norway ? 

It might even be local. There are forests at the base of those Alps.


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## RPM (Apr 29, 2010)

I'd guess the white wood is likely Scandhovian ... our mill used to (shut down now) mill doug-fir diminsional stock (metric) bound for Europe. 

As far as cost effectiveness ... all of our hardwood floor stock goes to China to get finished and then shipped back here for less than $5/sqft (red oak / maple). 

I guess if all you pay your labor is rice and noodles ...


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## Mike Van (Apr 29, 2010)

Great pics Bob -


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## mikeb1079 (Apr 29, 2010)

great stuff bob. thanks for taking the time to post those photos and give us a description of what's going on. what a cool business. i too am interested in where they get their wood from.


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## jimdad07 (Apr 29, 2010)

Incredible pictures Bob, someday I would love to sit and pick your brain, you get to see some impressive stuff.


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## HUCKLEBERRY (Apr 29, 2010)

*Awesome*

I do alot of timber frame and log work and the pictures of that bridge almost brought tears to my eyes. I am pleased to see that they have found a way to blend technology and woodcraft. Do they want to expand to Colorado, USA?


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## Brmorgan (Apr 30, 2010)

RPM said:


> I'd guess the white wood is likely Scandhovian ... our mill used to (shut down now) mill doug-fir diminsional stock (metric) bound for Europe.
> 
> As far as cost effectiveness ... all of our hardwood floor stock goes to China to get finished and then shipped back here for less than $5/sqft (red oak / maple).
> 
> I guess if all you pay your labor is rice and noodles ...



I used to pile some of that stuff when I was in high school. LITERAL 3" X 8", rough sawn and green to boot, called them "Belgian Export". Those suckers were heavy as lead and were a nightmare to pile because they wouldn't slide on each other worth stink. The leftover ones made great yard skids though.

Bob, that looks like it would be about the best job I could dream of having... 

That bridge looks a bit like the one they built down in Golden, here in BC. It'll be right on your route if you do come west from Calgary this summer - it's only about 3 hours' drive west of there. I had totally forgotten about it, but come to think of it now you'd probably like to stop and see it. I never have, but I saw a TV show about its construction a while ago and it was amazing. No half-million-dollar equipment budget there though - everything was done by hand, with chainsaws, or with WoodMizer mills. WM has some info on it *HERE*, I think I might have posted it a long time ago, but I can't remember.


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## 820wards (Apr 30, 2010)

Mike Van said:


> Great pics Bob -



Very Nice Bob. Thanks for sharing!

Hey guys, do you think Bob is going to go home and figure out how he can run his mill with a computer? I can hear his brain cells working right now. "If I just......"


jerry-


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## BobL (Apr 30, 2010)

Thanks guys. The wood is all local alpine timber(White or Red Abete [Picea abies] and Larch). I'll get some pictures of their woods which are very extensive.
Here are some Abete logs at a local sawmill.






The situation with woods here is very interesting. For hundreds of years and up until WWII the locals used to run 3-4-6 cows per family. The method they used was the typical alpine meadow system run all across Europe. Families would group cattle together in small herds and take them up to mountain meadows in late spring and leave them there for summer and part of autumn, and then bring them back to stables for the winter. Large sections of mountain meadow were mown (by hand) to generate hay for the winter.

Mountain meadows are not all natural and large areas of woods had to be cleared to create pastures. Heating was (and to some extent still is) by wood so keeping the meadows clear provided pasture and wood. Like this;





These days most cows are housed in intensive lots and fed grain and other feed so mountain meadows are no longer used. As a result they are reverting very quickly to woods. The woods are recovering so quickly that within another 50 or so years most of the mountain meadows will have reverted to forest. So these meadows now generate significant amounts of forest which is superbly managed to a sustainable level. They generate enough wood for themselves and even export some to other parts of Europe.

They also use every bit of the trees they take down and chip the waste to run large thermal electric generators to generate electricity and hot water for heating. On Sunday I am going to visit one of these big wood chip heating plants.

Here are a few more pics I took yesterday.

This is a completely wooden house made by my cousins - sorry the pic is not so good, its a picture of a picture on a computer screen.





Here is a typical house showing use of timber in balconies and ballustrades.




This house looks big but it also probably houses 3 families.


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## mtngun (Apr 30, 2010)

BobL said:


> forest which is superbly managed to a sustainable level. They generate enough wood for themselves and even export some to other parts of Europe.
> 
> They also use every bit of the trees they take down and chip the waste to run large thermal electric generators to generate electricity and hot water for heating.


I bet they do manage their forests well (unlike in the USA). 

We don't do much of the biomass generation here, either. It's just starting to catch on, but generally isn't profitable without subsidies. 

Instead, they burn the logging slash. Some of our slash piles are the size of a house or two. The slash fires get out of control and burn the surrounding forest. Sometimes it burns for months, until it is extinguished by fall rains. Unbelievable waste.

But, I am hijacking your thread. Thanks for the information, it is very interesting to see how things are done in other countries.

All the roofs appear to be tile or slate ? Is that required by code, or just a tradition ?


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## little possum (Apr 30, 2010)

Thanks for taking the time to share. It was a very interesting read.


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## BobL (Apr 30, 2010)

mtngun said:


> I bet they do manage their forests well (unlike in the USA).
> We don't do much of the biomass generation here, either. It's just starting to catch on, but generally isn't profitable without subsidies.
> 
> Instead, they burn the logging slash. Some of our slash piles are the size of a house or two. The slash fires get out of control and burn the surrounding forest. Sometimes it burns for months, until it is extinguished by fall rains. Unbelievable waste.


They seem to have the waste stuff more under control than most places. Even the smallish stuff that is trimmed off the trees along the sides of small road is turned into firewood. They bundle it into 4 ft lengths and drop it off at peoples houses where they break it it down into 12" lengths for stoves and fire places. One thing they do have is a high population density which helps.



> But, I am hijacking your thread. Thanks for the information, it is very interesting to see how things are done in other countries.


 I agree it's fascinating to see. I have been here 11 times to see my relatives (I have them all over northern Italy) but usually it is a real rush so I have not had time to see what work they do. This time I have 2 full weeks and am making a point of finding out.



> All the roofs appear to be tile or slate ? Is that required by code, or just a tradition ?


It's mostly tradition but there is also a requirement that traditional buildings be restored as they were. There is also huge slate business in the mountains that exports all over Europe.


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## irishcountry (Apr 30, 2010)

Beautiful stuff all the way around amazing veiws and setup!!! i'd love a house built like that!~ What are the roofs made of some look like clay tiles or metal stamped to look like it??? thank you for taking the time to inform us all on your journey and posting pics!!


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## indiansprings (Apr 30, 2010)

Thanks for sharing. Very interesting post. Great technology! Beautiful country, I'd love to have a couple of those bridges over springs on my place.
Keep posting, it's always good to see how other countries operate.


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## BobL (May 6, 2010)

I FInally downloaded these pics from my camera.

Last Sunday I went to visit a big (4 Megawatt average operation) woodchip fired water heating plant supervised/managed by one of my cousins in the Italian Alps.

The plant is located right in the middle of the major ski resort of San Martino and was installed to reduce the amount of pollution that covers the resort in a brown fog, especially during some of the colder skiing season weeks when all of the hotels and lodges would have run their oil fired heaters on max.

Here's a shot of the main plant building and a pile of woodchips ready for burning - nothing special to look at but, then it does need to blend into the ski resort.





Wood chips are dumped into those to two bays by a front end loader where a conveyor belt and large piston rams feed the chip into the furnaces. 

There are two (soon to be 3) furnaces each of 4 MW each and also a 4 MW oil fired furnace for use on really cold days and in emergencies as they are really only getting started.





The furnaces heats a pressurised hot water circuit which circulates around the plant at about 200F. 
This water then heats the resort town loop which goes around to all the houses, hotels and resorts. The water leaves the plant @ around 180F. 
These are the 30kW pumps that drive the water in secondary loop around the town.




At each house, hotel or resort a small heat exchanger extracts heat from the town line for internal heating and hot water.
The burn rate in the furnaces are maintained such that the temperature in the return line back to the plant never drops below 130F.

The exhaust from the furnaces are electostatically filtered and the soot is dropped into large dumpsters. 
This removes about 800 tones of soot a year from the air.
Condensers are also used to remove water from the exhaust.
The remaining gases are then mixed with large volumes of external air and expelled as totally clear gas from a low rise smoke stack at a temperature of around 85F

Here is a port open in the side of the smoke stack.




While there some residual oil vapours in the exhaust - the gas coming out of the port was completely od.
The resort people are very happy about the outcome.
The oil companies that used to supply the hundreds of thousands of gallons of heating oil a year to the resorts are not.

There are over 40 such plants in the Italian Alps and many more in the pipeline. 
The chips are waste from logging or clearing operations and law dictates they cannot travel more than 40 miles to the plant.
There are way more chips available than they can burn so the next step is to introduce a thermo electric system 

I think we can learn a lot from these people. 
The other alternative is Russian gas and it has to pass through 7 countries to get there!


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## Brmorgan (May 6, 2010)

BobL said:


> Thanks guys. The wood is all local alpine timber(White or Red Abete [Picea abies] and Larch). I'll get some pictures of their woods which are very extensive.



I missed that before. That's an odd name; it literally means "Spruce Fir" (or Fir Spruce, depending how you read it) since Picea is the family name for Spruce, and Abies the name for the True Firs (not Douglas). Being a tree nut I'd be interested to hear the history behind that naming. My neighbor also cuts up even the limbs of his trees for firewood - he's retired and has the time though! I don't even like going after trees under ~10" because it takes too many to fill a load. Spoiled, I guess!

Bob, we have the largest wood-fired biomass power plant in North America here in town; I'll have to show you if/when you make it over this way. It's a huge operation - they built it smack-dab in the middle of half a dozen mills, so the fuel supply couldn't get any closer. The coolest part by far though are the huge hydraulic ram lifts that tilt the entire tractor-trailer up to dump the contents out. I know it's a huge no-no, but just once I'd like to sit in a truck as they lift it up.

website:
*http://www.capitalpowerincome.ca/en-ca/operations/Canada/Pages/williams.aspx*

They're discussing building another big one out west of here, right in the middle of all the beetle-killed pine. Once the trees are no longer salvageable for lumber, they'll still burn just fine. I do like the European idea of having many smaller plants though, rather than just one or two enormous eyesores. Either way though, it's very clean - our plant emits less smoke than the neighboring plywood mill does; heck, on a bad day our sawmill probably smokes more. It does create a ton of steam, though.


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## mtngun (May 6, 2010)

Thanks for the plant tour, BobL.

My college (UofI) heated most of the campus, including the sidewalks, with a boiler fired by wood chips. They ran steam lines under the sidewalks so the sidewalks were never icy in the winter. Perhaps that's a bit extravagant, but at the time the wood chips were a waste product from local mills and cost little or nothing.

Most of the mills have long since shut down and/or found a market for their chips, so now the college probably has to pay good money for the chips. It is still better than importing foreign oil, or drilling offshore. 

It may cost a lot of money to set up a plant like that, but once it is paid for, it shouldn't cost that much to operate. I'd like to see a small biomass plant in my neighborhood to put the logging waste to good use rather than polluting the skies with senseless slash fires. 

If we can subsidize nuclear power and fight endless wars for oil, why can't we subsidize plants to produce energy with a local, renewable resource ? :angrysoapbox:


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## Brmorgan (May 6, 2010)

Different companies around here have played with the idea of grinding slash out in the bush and trucking it into town for hog fuel, but current diesel prices seem to make it uncompetitive for the truckers so nobody's been doing it on a serious level. And when you consider most of our logging is being done 50+ miles away, it's a considerable haul when you're talking about dozens of trucks to clear off a cutblock. So I do like the idea of building more plants farther out of town, closer to the supply. With all the mill cutbacks in town, our plant was hurting for fuel for a while because they rely so heavily on sawmill waste rather than forest debris. They can only burn fine pieces properly, too - no logs or tree pieces.


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## DRB (May 6, 2010)

Near Kamloops they have some large chip making operations out in the bush to use the small gnarly pine trees for chips. They grind them into chips in the cut blocks load them onto B train chip trucks and haul them to the Frazer River. The chip trucks back haul garbage from Vancouver to the Ashcroft land fill and then back to Kamloops for another load of chips. 

Its hard to imagine that's worth it

My dads neighbor in Powell River a 100 miles up the coast from Vancouver is a manager at the pulp and paper mill and he says they have been getting their chips from the Frazer River by barge because there is a shortage of chips along the coast because of the sawmill shut downs.

Lets see make chips 400km from the ocean in the interior of BC load them on trucks and drive them to the coast. Load them on barges for a 200km trip to the pulp mill? 

Sounds like the oil companies win again

Oh ya cool trip BobL

Looks like they have a pretty efficient system there.


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## DRB (May 6, 2010)

BobL said:


> The designs are then sent down to the half million dollar milling and joinery machine shown here.
> 
> 
> 
> ...



We have been looking at building a post & beam style house. Some of the Timber Frame manufactures use some of the same type of technology here in BC. Daizen has his shop set up a 5 minute drive from my house.

www.fraserwoodindustries.com/
http://www.daizen.com/cnc.php?pic=9


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## Brmorgan (May 6, 2010)

DRB said:


> Near Kamloops they have some large chip making operations out in the bush to use the small gnarly pine trees for chips. They grind them into chips in the cut blocks load them onto B train chip trucks and haul them to the Frazer River. The chip trucks back haul garbage from Vancouver to the Ashcroft land fill and then back to Kamloops for another load of chips.
> 
> Its hard to imagine that's worth it
> 
> ...



Well, trains are pretty efficient. They can move a ton of freight something like 400+ miles on a gallon of fuel, at least according to their ads. Still, I do agree that it seems ridiculous. Meanwhile, they want to build a plant in Kamloops to burn shredded creosote railway ties - that's a gem of an idea; ship the clean wood to the coast and burn the :censored: locally in a valley with 100,000+ residents...

Before we shut down last year, one of our main chip customers was the big pulp mill in Nanaimo, before it shut down. Chips were trucked down to somewhere around Van, unloaded onto barges, and shipped to the pulp mill. Apparently the mill is right on the ocean and can take the chips straight out of the barges, from what I hear. I haven't been there since '95 and was too young to care about such things, so I can't remember.


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## mtngun (May 7, 2010)

Brmorgan said:


> Different companies around here have played with the idea of grinding slash out in the bush and trucking it into town for hog fuel


It my neighborhood, it's barely profitable to truck logs to the mill, let alone slash.

That's one reason there is so much slash -- it's not worth hauling the smaller and poorer quality logs to the mill, so they get burned instead.

But ..... there are portable, small scale biomass power plants that can go to the slash, rather than trucking the slash to the power plant. You just need a place to tie into the power grid. 

Of course, it is not going to happen unless there are subsidies and perhaps even mandates. But, we subsidize other forms of power. Most of our hydro dams were subsidized. The nuclear industry wouldn't exist without government support. We spend billions on war and diplomacy to support our oil addiction, and domestic oil producers get a depletion allowance. Ethanol is subsidized and/or mandated. Etc..


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## BobL (May 9, 2010)

As promised here's a link to a short you tube clip or the automated milling and joinery machine described in the first post of this thread.

First minute or so it's just docking the ends of roofing beams at an angle.

At about the one minute mark the clip switches to where my cousin stuck a shorter test piece in and did a couple of things with the other tools.

1) Preps the scrolled end with the cutting rotor.
2) Drills a rounded mortise in the side with a big drill bit
3) Drills some holes
4) Cuts a tenon on the end with the rotor
5) Rotates the piece by 90º
6) Finishes the scrolled end using the big router tool

If you hang out to the end you can see a close up of the scrolled end.

Sorry the video is not to clear. It was made with a cell phone mostly behind a dusty screen - and with that sort of rotating metal you can see why I was keen to stay behind the screen.

The language being spoken is the local dialect.

Oh yeah and here is the link.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o8VC3VZvFpA


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## HUCKLEBERRY (May 9, 2010)

Thanks for the video.

Some of the bigger timber frame companies here in the states use the Hundeggers to produce frames. That is one slick piece of machinery or should I say that is quite a few slick pieces of machinery.

Seeing that beast in operation gives me some ideas about the use of jigs and a router with an extra long bit (like those finger mills on the Hundegger) mounted to the bar holder on my CSM carriage to speed up a few tasks like mortise housings etc.


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## BobL (May 10, 2010)

HUCKLEBERRY said:


> Thanks for the video.





> Some of the bigger timber frame companies here in the states use the Hundeggers to produce frames. That is one slick piece of machinery or should I say that is quite a few slick pieces of machinery.



On this page, http://www.hundegger.com/schlitzgeraet-vertik.html?&L=1 , Hundegger show an interesting use for a dual bar chain saw attachment for their joinery machines. Now how can we use that on a CS mill. I'd love to see the drive end arrangement.



> Seeing that beast in operation gives me some ideas about the use of jigs and a router with an extra long bit (like those finger mills on the Hundegger) mounted to the bar holder on my CSM carriage to speed up a few tasks like mortise housings etc.



Yep - I like look at any machinery as it often gives me ideas for other machines.

Cheers


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## betterbuilt (Dec 12, 2010)

Some how I missed this thread. Nice.

I love this pic.


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