Old Lumberjack Tools
- Six-foot, two-man crosscut saws were used to down tall trees. These saws required a lumberjack on each end; the blade was drawn back and forth through a tree trunk. Similar to the large crosscut saw, a two-man trim or cutoff saw was tapered at one end and used to cut the limbs from a tree. A one-man tool, the primitive wood-framed bucksaw was roughly 36 inches square; it featured a wooden handle on either side of a tautly stretched metal saw blade.
- Once the tree was felled and prepared for transport, loggers used cant hooks and pickaroon timber-handling tools to wrangle the timber. These tools featured long hardwood handles attached to various configurations of spikes and levers. The long handle provided the lumberjack increased leverage to roll timbers into position or unjam them from one another. A bark spud, another long-handled tool, was used to peel bark from the tree just before it entered the mill.
- Lumberjacks used hatchets and axes with various-sized heads and handle lengths; different types were specialized for individual applications. Shorter-handled hewing hatchets were used for close-quarter work; long-handled single- and double-blade axes were used to down trees and hew large limbs.
- Often located on riverbanks, sawmills used the river current to power buzz saw blades up to 30 inches in diameter to process timber. Logs, floated downstream from the forest work area to the sawmill, were placed on a carriage mechanism and moved into the sawmill, where they were sliced and trimmed into rough-sawn boards. As lumberjack technology advanced, the solid-steel blades were replaced with massive band saws that also could be powered by river current. Band saws were not limited by the diameter of the tree trunk, as were traditional, round buzz saw blades.