HAPPINESS is a brand new TimberKing 2000. New customers, Kevin and Diane Hill picked up their mill at our factory and towed it home.
Many of our customers have their new TimberKing Sawmills delivered by truck. But quite a few drive to Kansas City to tour our factory and pick up their mills themselves. Kevin and Diane Hill picked up their new TK 2000 and towed it home — 6 hours at 70 MPH. “Pulls down the highway nice,” they told us. But towing it home was just part of their do-it-yourself story.
“We moved to the mountains of Oklahoma — we’re transplants from Texas. We bought 20 acres here over 10 years ago and have been developing it over that time. This is a densely wooded property with cedar, walnut, oak, pine, hickory, and more. When we bought it, you couldn’t even drive into it. It backs up to thousands of acres of National Forest near Blue Mountain.
Serious Do-It-Yourselfers Living Off the Grid
We’re do-it-yourself people. I’m a carpenter by trade. We build for others and ourselves, and we garden – when we can keep the deer out! The first thing we did was clear trees to put in a well and build our home. We had someone mill the trees on an old circle sawmill. Running electricity would have cost $100,000 so we went off the grid with solar electric power. We have 30 solar panels and 20 rechargeable nickel-iron batteries.
We cut more trees and had trouble finding someone to mill them, so we thought why not get our own mill. We’re retired so why not? If all the sawyers around here are so busy, we’ll just do it ourselves.
So far, we’ve sawed about 4,000 board feet of lumber and have built our house, a cabin, a workshop, a house for our solar batteries, and we’re getting ready to build a garage and a chicken coop. We plan to build a drying shed with ventilation and fans. Since we cut our own trees, practically the only building cost we have is for nails!
Building a Retirement Business
We saw lumber for ourselves but we’ve also started sawing and selling lumber. There are big trees around here and we’ve sawn logs 30” diameter by 16’ long and longer. We saw pine framing material and we have an order for oak flooring. Live-edge siding is very popular around here. We saw hickory for cabinets and tons of people want cedar lumber.
We’ll probably turn this into a full time retirement business. We call it Blue Mountain Sawmill. Advertising is important and we’ve found our Facebook page is our best form of advertising. We actually started advertising before we got the mill.
Sawing is work, of course. If you don’t want to be busy, sawing isn’t for you. But if you have trees and are into construction, it’s certainly nice to cut your own trees and saw your own lumber. It’s work but it’s also fun to put a log on the mill and see the beauty of the wood emerge as the mill turns the log into lumber.
Cantilever mills just don’t make sense
We know the TimberKing is a great investment and we’ve very happy, not a bit disappointed. We’d been looking at mills for a while before buying and those with the cantilever head didn’t impress us. Having the head attached at only one side doesn’t even sound like it would work! With a wide log, the thickness would be all kinds of off. Cantilever just doesn’t sound right. TimberKing, on the other hand, has a 4-post head that’s solid. You just don’t see it moving much. Once you’re set up you’re right on track.
We looked at TimberKing’s lineup and ended up buying the 2000. The bigger ones seemed too big for us and the smaller ones seemed too small. We love that TimberKing 2500 but it’s too big for us and more than we wanted to pay. We thought the 2000 was the right mill at a fair price.
When we were ready to buy, we made the arrangements and drove to Kansas City to pick up the mill. We towed it home, about 6 hours on the road at 70 miles an hour. The mill pulls down the highway nice but we did get some looks from other drivers!
— Kevin & Diane Hill, TK 2000 owners, Blue Mountain Sawmill, Hodgen OK
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