- Most people, when you say Sawyer, they go, huh?

What's that?

A Sawyer is somebody that makes lumber outta logs.

S-A-W-Y-E-R, just like Tom Sawyer.

Sawdust has kind of been in my blood my entire life, growing up around it.

You know, as a kid we were, all of us always played down here and not just played, but dad put us to work.

I'm, I'm fifth generation in the business.

We're also the oldest business in the town of Bloomfield.

I've been working here since, well, since 1978, when I was getting 25 cents an hour to pound nails into this building that I'm sitting in.

I love working outdoors.

I like the winters a little less than I used to, but the older I get, but I could never work in an office.

From day to day it changes as to who calls or comes in and what they're looking for.

I can make pretty much anything from a, a two by four to a 16 by 16.

It was some years ago when the church steeple in Hartford was repaired.

We supplied the timber for the steeple that was 30 feet long and it was 16 by 16 at the base and two feet up it tapered down to an eight by eight.

Yeah, I do do do a lot of historic type restoration, whether it be actual historical restoration or just people that own own old houses.

They open up a wall and they've got actual, real two by fours in it.

You're not gonna find at the big box stores.

The first thing I need to do is to debug them, make sure there's no hardware inside 'em.

You name it.

I found jack knives, forks, and the people put it in the tree and they don't take it out and the tree eats it.

Next step is to either chop off any loose bark or if the bark is on the entire log starting to come off, then I debark it with a special hand tool.

I need need to clean the log, clean the dirt off the log, and make sure there's no metal in it because the teeth in the saw are mild steel and both the dirt and the hardware in a log can damage a saw.

It could, depending on what you hit, you can ruin teeth.

The first thing to do is to get the log onto the carriage and off, off the log deck.

I use the stop and loader for that.

Once it's onto the carriage, I then use the log turner to roll it around and position it into the best location to be able to get as much material and or the material that I'm looking specifically to get.

I'm doing math calculations to figure out where, where I need to be at in order to get everything I want to get.

The saw itself takes a quarter of an inch, so if I want to get three, two inch boards that are full two inch, I need to have six and a half inches after taking the slab and and a board or two depending on what I'm doing.

Then I come back and I roll the log and put that first flat side down and then again reposition it, dog it down again and start making my next cuts.

And I continue to do that on the other two sides until I'm down to the point where I am ready to either saw it all on the boards or saw it into the specific order I'm trying to make.

Sometimes it's harder to do than other times.

Some, some days I gotta work a little bit harder to get what I want out of that log and sometimes I don't get it.

Then you go get another log.

It's a lot harder than it used to be.

When I had other people helping me and and sawing alone, typically when I had somebody else working with me, they would be removing all the slabs and or boards or setting the boards that need to be edged up back up on the deck.

And now working alone, I've gotta try and figure out how the best way to do it all myself.

It's certainly not the most efficient way to run a sawmill, but I get the work done.

I take a lot of pride in being able to make a finished product out of a, out of a, a raw material.

Just a little bit of art, artistic nature in being able to do that.

And I love what I do and I don't know what else I would do.