The Legendary Wood-Mizer LT40 Sawmill: Learn What Sawmillers Tell About This Machine

The first Wood-Mizer sawmill was designed in 1982 and since that time Wood-Mizer company produced more than 100.000 sawmills – a great part of them were LT40. What makes this machine so special?

MOBILITY. The LT40 sawmill allows for a portable conversion of logs to timber where the material is needed, for example, at a construction site, in a customer’s backyard, in the forest. The design of the sawmill is lightweight and compact, simply said – ideal for towing it behind a car.  The sawhead is secured for the time of transportation, and once the sawmill is at the site, all you need to do is adjust the legs, detach the fenders, and … you’re good to go!  

„The LT40 is a fantastic and useful machine. It works well in every weather. It does a great job in contract sawmilling in the mountains. It is simple and intuitive in operation. I can transport it to the sawmilling site when it is attached to the car as a trailer. I don’t have to carry heavy logs to the stationary sawmill anymore. I enjoy working on my LT40 sawmill,” says David Jones from Scotland, a user of the LT40.   

VERSATILITY. ”The LT40 sawmill is the worldwide top-selling Wood-Mizer machine because it fits most sawmilling companies' business profiles. It is a smart solution for an individual sawmillers, for a middle-size company that keeps its production at a constant level, and finally, for large sawmilling enterprises which have the potential to extend the LT40 to a small sawmilling system,” notices Dariusz Kujawa, Manager of Customer Service, a specialist with a long experience.  

The LT40 sawmill can produce different types of timber – from classical timber for building a house to various construction elements and finishing slats or boards. The LT40 sawmill is compatible with a log deck, sorting table, board edger (e.g., EG300), or a multirip (e.g., MR200). In addition, it is a good match for planers/moulders, thicknessers, or table saws produced by Wood-Mizer. 

RELIABILITY. The reliability of the LT40 sawmill is proven in the hot and humid air of Subtropical Africa, the coniferous and deciduous forests of Europe, and the harsh climate of Scandinavia. The sawmillers use their LT40s to mill various species of wood - softwoods and hardwoods, frozen, humid, and dry woods. Sometime the LT40 sawmill is used even to cut large ice cubes for building ice hotels!  

„Wood-Mizer offers spare parts even for the oldest LT40 sawmills, which defines the strength of the Wood-Mizer brand while delivering the owners much benefit. The fact that there are so many LT40 sawmills in use globally is the evidence of the machine’s usefulness and longevity,” points out Grzegorz Laskowski, Production and Investment Corporate Director, working in Wood-Mizer since the mid-1990s.  

BUSINESS. „In the old times, starting a sawmilling business was always connected with building an infrastructure for the stationary sawmill – laying the floor, building the foundations, erecting the roof, etc., which triggered relatively high initial costs. With LT40 mobility as the main feature of the sawmill, many people could start their businesses after a 2-day training in sawmill maintenance and operation,” remembers Grzegorz Laskowski. 

„The launch of the LT40 sawmill was a breakthrough for young businessmen because it encouraged them to act independently. They could make business decisions by themselves and earn their living also by themselves. Moreover, operating the sawmill was quite easy while maintaining it required only a minimal understanding of general mechanics,” says Richard Vivers, Chairman of the Board of Wood-Mizer Holdings Inc., committed to managing the company for over 30 years and started his professional career from contract sawmilling in his homeland Scotland.   

USERS. The first sawmill built in 1982 in the USA was delivered to the customer Joe Bistrovich who started the machine’s successful sales record.

„In the past, the biggest concern for our sawmilling company was processing those larger logs. None of the nearby sawmilling companies dealt well with cutting 70-80 cm wide logs, and the quality of the service was terrible. The LT40 sawmill that we saw at our friend’s was just the thing we needed. We were glad to see the sawmill saved the wood leaving only a 2-mm kerf in the log and the operation of it was easy and intuitive. In addition, it was compact and very accurate. The sawmill we purchased has been doing a great job, especially on hard and expensive woods,” point out the owners of the Polish company DOM, specializing in making wooden houses.  

„I value the LT40 sawmill mostly for the ease and comfort of operation. For a woman working daily on this machine, it’s important to use the hydraulics for convenient log-loading, turning, leveling, and clamping it securely on the bed. The control panel in my LT40 sawmill has been equipped with the device for automatic thickness control of sawn timber (Setworks), which resolves me from having to count and remember board thickness. The Setworks recalculates these values automatically, and each time the sawhead returns to its initial position, the device sets it to the desired thickness,” notices Sandra Eule, a self-sufficient female sawmiller from Thuringia, Germany.    

„We fell in love with that machine ever since we saw it at the trade show presentation,” recall the Geronazzo brothers from Italy, running contract sawmilling in hard-to-access regions of the Alps. „With the mobile LT40 sawmill, we can get to the place appointed by the customer and work on site. Once we arrive at a place, we start the engine to warm it up, and after a few minutes, we’re ready to start making the boards. That way, we managed to eliminate the transportation problem and save much money. We don’t need a farm tractor or a truck to carry logs from the forest and deliver boards to the customer”. 

PHILOSOPHY. A Wood-Mizer sawmill is more than just a machine for converting logs to timber. These machines teach how to use wood responsibly, protecting and saving forest lands for the next generations. The Wood-Mizer sawmills are often used to revitalize parks and forests, giving the rejected logs a chance for a second life and an opportunity for people to build practical objects from wood. 

„The LT40 sawmill was the first machine created with the thought of responsible management of forest resources. With the super-thin sawmill blades that make only a 2-mm kerf in the wood, every log is converted most efficiently while the amount of waste is reduced to the minimum. If we suppose that this way we can save at least one board on each log, we can easily understand how much forest we can preserve from cutting down in a longer period. Additionally, the mobility of the Wood-Mizer machines allows for curbing the carbon footprint of a sawmilling process because it eliminates the need to transport the logs to a stationary sawmill, as it used to be in the old days,” notices Robert Bagiński, the President of Wood-Mizer Industries in Koło, Poland, aboard the company since 1996.   

New York Heartwoods, a municipal sawmilling and woodworking company located in New York, USA, is one of the promotors of the so-called urban wood economy, specializing in renewals of local forests and rational utilization of unwanted logs. „We picked up a contact with the local Transportation Office, recycling centers, as well as farm and forest owners to „save” the logs which would get to the dumpsite anyways. This wood gets a „new life” from us, as we transform it to high-value and practical products such as park tables and benches, fences, floorboards, furniture or even town buildings,” claims Megan Offner, a co-founder of New York Heartwoods.

Wood-Mizer LT40 sawmill is a classical machine that gave birth to the whole series of LT sawmills and, in the following years, also to the LX series. Today, many sawmills of other brands look so much like the LT40 – they follow its design!  

In 2022, Wood-Mizer celebrated the 40th anniversary of the LT40 sawmill. It is an outstanding recognition for this machine, its leading engineers, all the Wood-Mizer employees, and thousands of its owners around the world who can call it proudly “My legendary LT40 sawmill”. 

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