This story begins more than a year ago, when Dr. Charles Reiter began poking around on the Internet, looking for a way to mill the ubiquitous cedar growing on the family's 1,000-acre ranch near Lake Belton. The Reiters plan to use the lumber when they build a "green" home.
The search led him to the Hill Country, near Kerrville, where a widow was clearing out her late husband's tools. For $700, Reiter bought a pile of rusty steel, a diesel engine and three chest-high blades with jagged teeth. A heavy-hauling outfit trucked the pieces to the Reiters' Owl Creek Ranch.
When Glen White first saw the defunct sawmill, he wondered what he had gotten into, volunteering to put the contraption back together without instructions. After serving in the Vietnam War, White worked at a sawmill back home in Virginia, at the base of Twelve O'Clock Knob. He also worked on heavy machinery in Temple for a decade. White reckoned all sawmills are alike.
Not exactly.
"We had no idea which way everything went. I probably bit off a little more than I wanted," White, 54, said. "We have cussed it, believe me; I did get mad at times."
White and his co-worker, Andy Vaughn, spent about nine months returning the old sawmill to its former glory. Everything was either rusted, backward, too short or too long.
The "Doc" had a 70-foot slab poured, but the old train tracks that hold the log carriage measure 85 feet and hung off the end like toes dangling off the foot of the bed. Figuring out which way the blade turns was too risky for trial and error. So, White telephoned an old-timer back in Arkansas, who had worked a lifetime on sawmills, and he explained you have to cut downward.
Then one day a belt broke. The carriage that holds the logs took off, out of control until a spring at the end of the tracks caught the runaway rig.
White and Vaughn solved some problems relying on experience and common sense. They added a foot pedal to regulate engine rpms. They strung air hoses like a clothesline to carry compressed air that can disengage the blade and lock down the lumber with big hooks. They tuned up the monster 1959 Detroit diesel engine, and attached a 60-gallon fuel tank cannibalized from a Winnebago. And they pounded and lubricated frozen steel teeth and connections until they were ready to chew again.
Still, when they cut the first log, the learning curve was uphill.
"We were both ready to run," White said, recalling the wobbly blade. "I forgot about all this stuff. I never cut nothing this crooked. I'd always cut perfectly round trees. You just put it up there and go."
While Vaughn and White worked out the knots in the sawmill, the Reiters kept busy at their positions with Temple College and Scott & White Memorial Hospital. Although the Reiters have dumped much more than their original investment into the sawmill, comparing prices on the Web for new and used sawmills - $4,000 to $30,000 - it looks like they got a good deal.
Down the road, they may go commercial. (Dr. Reiter likes the name, "Lumber by Lois.") But the sawmill today is a large, loud, outdoor conversation piece.
"It's a real source of entertainment right now. We're just at the very beginning," Dr. Reiter said. "We're learning every day. It's a work in progress."
