fuse
New Shoots
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- Name
- Martin
- LOCATION
- Uk
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Hi all and welcome to TheWoodHaven2 brought into the 21st Century, kicking and screaming! We all have Alasdair to thank for the vast bulk of the heavy lifting to get us here, no more so than me because he's taken away a huge burden of responsibility from my shoulders and brought us to this new shiny home, with all your previous content (hopefully) still intact! Please peruse and feed back. There is still plenty to do, like changing the colour scheme, adding the banner graphic, tweaking the odd setting here and there so I have added a new thread in the 'Technical Issues, Bugs and Feature Requests' forum for you to add any issues you find, any missing settings or just anything you'd like to see added/removed from the feature set that Xenforo offers. We will get to everything over the coming weeks so please be patient, but add anything at all to the thread I mention above and we promise to get to them over the next few days/weeks/months. In the meantime, please enjoy!
Mill shaft
- Thread starter fuse
- Start date
That also threw up a lot of other interesting videos down the RH side
Eric the Viking
Nordic Pine
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- Dec 10, 2020
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Fascinating.
If it really was shot in the winter of 1962-3, I find it somewhat shocking: Some things from my family background might explain a bit:
My mum was born in 1928, the oldest child of a family who owned a saw mill, by then for two generations (going back further my ancestors were sawyers in mills owned by others). Some of mum's earliest memories were the carthorses, literally being allowed out to play on Sundays (the sabbath). She said these huge horses would gambol around the yard like young foals! The stable building exists to this day - it became the mill office, but I don't know what it's used for now.
When we stayed with my grandparents in the 1960s, the mill was run in much the same way as it had been in the 1940s. I didn't realise at the time but it was fast becoming a time capsule even then. My mum's cousin took it on in the 1970s, and converted it into one of the first DIY "sheds", and that was largely that. I am very lucky to have known it as a real sawmill.
Anyway, mum also remembered when, in the early 1930s, they bought a traction engine (stationary ever after), to drive the line shafts in the mill.
They had two fires. The first one burned the place down. I think the second wasn't quite as bad. Both were supposedly caused by embers from the engine (which obviously burned mainly sawdust, for which it wasn't designed), but there were also a couple of sheds positioned centrally, inside the mill, surrounding large, scandinavian wood-burning stoves. The sheds were open on one side, with bench seating around the other three. They couldn't possibly have heated the whole mill, but these were warm places for breaks and lunch. The stoves also burned mostly sawdust (offcuts were sold, where possible), and the mill floor seemed to be made of sawdust too!. According to mum, the mill was finally 'encouraged' by the factory inspector to erect a brick engine house, with a big steel door between it and the wood working side.
The eventual removal of the engine was for electrification. I need to check, but I think it was in the 1940s (I suspect they got a 'turnkey' deal from Wadkin, with the possible exception of the big bandsaw). During the war they had a big contract to supply pit props to the mines. This might have provided the funds to do it - I don't know, and in any case I'd guess the machinery would've been pretty scarce.
Point being that the team in the film were using techniques, and horses, just as my grandfather and great uncles did in the early 1930s.
In Britain, in contrast, things had been motorised and electrified long before the 1960s. I remember the crane and special lorry (for treetrunks) that the felling gang used, parked up in the yard. They even had a two-man chainsaw, although I think it was an opportunistic buy from Canadian war suplus and they hardly used it.
The stark contrast between these workers in the film and the modernity of the British equivalent probably shows how focused Germany had been on military production, rather than generally modernising its industry. And that post-war Europe was a pretty hard life, even though there was no shooting any more.
Technical note: The Youtube info says this was released in 1964, but obviously it could be a bit earlier. It's a nice transfer to video. The cameraman behaves professionally, although some of it is evidently staged - I think it was professionally directed, too. Some of it, near the end at the mill site was evidently shot on 35mm (there's lots of sharp detail - Zeiss and Dallmeyer both made excellent lenses!). I think, however, that most of the felling gang stuff was 16mm. It would be a great exercise to teach youngsters how to do "Foley" work in the studio, as I think it''s entirely mute.
And that jug... Schnapps enough for everyone?
If it really was shot in the winter of 1962-3, I find it somewhat shocking: Some things from my family background might explain a bit:
My mum was born in 1928, the oldest child of a family who owned a saw mill, by then for two generations (going back further my ancestors were sawyers in mills owned by others). Some of mum's earliest memories were the carthorses, literally being allowed out to play on Sundays (the sabbath). She said these huge horses would gambol around the yard like young foals! The stable building exists to this day - it became the mill office, but I don't know what it's used for now.
When we stayed with my grandparents in the 1960s, the mill was run in much the same way as it had been in the 1940s. I didn't realise at the time but it was fast becoming a time capsule even then. My mum's cousin took it on in the 1970s, and converted it into one of the first DIY "sheds", and that was largely that. I am very lucky to have known it as a real sawmill.
Anyway, mum also remembered when, in the early 1930s, they bought a traction engine (stationary ever after), to drive the line shafts in the mill.
They had two fires. The first one burned the place down. I think the second wasn't quite as bad. Both were supposedly caused by embers from the engine (which obviously burned mainly sawdust, for which it wasn't designed), but there were also a couple of sheds positioned centrally, inside the mill, surrounding large, scandinavian wood-burning stoves. The sheds were open on one side, with bench seating around the other three. They couldn't possibly have heated the whole mill, but these were warm places for breaks and lunch. The stoves also burned mostly sawdust (offcuts were sold, where possible), and the mill floor seemed to be made of sawdust too!. According to mum, the mill was finally 'encouraged' by the factory inspector to erect a brick engine house, with a big steel door between it and the wood working side.
The eventual removal of the engine was for electrification. I need to check, but I think it was in the 1940s (I suspect they got a 'turnkey' deal from Wadkin, with the possible exception of the big bandsaw). During the war they had a big contract to supply pit props to the mines. This might have provided the funds to do it - I don't know, and in any case I'd guess the machinery would've been pretty scarce.
Point being that the team in the film were using techniques, and horses, just as my grandfather and great uncles did in the early 1930s.
In Britain, in contrast, things had been motorised and electrified long before the 1960s. I remember the crane and special lorry (for treetrunks) that the felling gang used, parked up in the yard. They even had a two-man chainsaw, although I think it was an opportunistic buy from Canadian war suplus and they hardly used it.
The stark contrast between these workers in the film and the modernity of the British equivalent probably shows how focused Germany had been on military production, rather than generally modernising its industry. And that post-war Europe was a pretty hard life, even though there was no shooting any more.
Technical note: The Youtube info says this was released in 1964, but obviously it could be a bit earlier. It's a nice transfer to video. The cameraman behaves professionally, although some of it is evidently staged - I think it was professionally directed, too. Some of it, near the end at the mill site was evidently shot on 35mm (there's lots of sharp detail - Zeiss and Dallmeyer both made excellent lenses!). I think, however, that most of the felling gang stuff was 16mm. It would be a great exercise to teach youngsters how to do "Foley" work in the studio, as I think it''s entirely mute.
And that jug... Schnapps enough for everyone?