Aloha friends at Wood Web
I'm a professional wooden boatbuilder who just crossed the line into making my own boat lumber because of the rising price of low-quality lumber that's available. I need advice on a molder from someone who is experienced with them. Here's how I'm set up:
1. 9-ton Pitman 900 truck crane, CDL, crane operator's license.
2. Free logs from local arborist companies; they charge the customer for hauling them away, I pick up $2-5,000 worth of logs for some diesel and my time. I've got about 100,000 bf in the front yard in logs from 24 inches diameter (that's a small log here) to 54 inches diameter.
3. New Mobile Dimension "128" 230V 3 phase electric rotary saw (cuts cants up to 8-1/2" by 12-1/2"), with hydraulic infeed and outfeed tables and stacking.
4. Heavy-duty vertical 36-inch resaw bandmill with 10 hp 3 phase motor, using 4 inch stellite-toothed blades with 1/16" kerf, and a hydraulically-driven carriage system with return and lumber handling built-in.
5. 5 hp 3ph 24-inch grizzly thickness sander
6. 150kw new Cummins diesel genset to power all this
I'm on the Big Island of Hawaii. There's a LOT of good boat lumber here: eucalyptus of many species (eg: saligna, citradura, think Honduras mahogany), teak equivalents, cypress, and so on. I expect to run the mill about 2 days a week making lumber and veneers for my boatbuilding business.
The resaw produces lumber that can almost be sanded to a final finish with 80-grit, so running it through a planer or molder next is easy and fast. Rather than get a planer, I'm thinking about getting a molder for my S4S boatbuilding stock, which I need in three or four standard sizes, and which I can run 20-40,000 lf of at a time to economize on labor and setup costs. I'd probably need to run this much every 8 weeks or so. But this doesn't keep the molder busy much of the time.
There is also a lot of high-end construction: $5-25,000,000 custom homes. And there's only ONE guy with an old Mattison molder who is absolutely overloaded on flooring orders and doesn't even bother making custom moldings from local hardwood. So I see this as an opportunity to keep the mill running with 1-2 employees full time (my son Victor one of them).
We'd make custom flooring orders and molding orders from local hardwoods for local high-end contractors to keep the mill busy, and NOT STOCK ANYTHING. It is possible for us to be competitive here because of the incredibly high cost of shipping to Hawaii, which adds $2-5/bf to the cost of anything made on the mainland or in Asia and shipped here.
My wife and I have had 12 different small businesses over the last 40 years, so we know what we're doing, how to finance, expand, and run numbers. This looks good to us, and remember, we need the mill and some kind of S4S planer anyway to make our boat lumber. From my reading so far, the Weinig 22N looks the best to me; although I'm comfortable with old cast-iron equipment like the Mattison 276, I'm a diesel mechanic and fabricator.
Here's what I need help with:
A. What make and model of molder would you recommend, and why?
B. Would you recommend 4-head, 5-head, or 6-head, and why? (lots of discussion about this on the forums, yeah?).
C. And finally, who is it safe to buy from who won't give you an old brokedown wornout piece of klunk while saying it's lightly used? Or how can you set up a sale so you don't get cheated?
I'm willing to come to the mainland, check out several candidates, then crate and ship the winner myself (after running it and checking all the wear points) if that's what I've got to do. I've got to ship it to Hawaii, and that's going to be $2-3k right there on top of the sale price. so can only do this once. (Maybe I'll just make the crate a little bigger and take an ocean voyage to save plane fare!)
So, thanks in advance for whatever great advice you have to offer (even if it's "you should get your head examined"!)
Aloha, Tim Mann...........
Member
