Well hello everyone:

Thanks to Mr. Ken Hume who put in a help call for me--- once again I am able to access this chat room, it has been 1 month since I have been able to come on board with all my friends from around the globe--it feels really good for sure!

I have been looking at the last post from Jim in regards to an explanation about starting and stopping a muley mill, well here we go--------

To start things off jim, you must understand that the muley blade is tethered to the crank fastened on the end of a 12" oak axle which in turn extends through the centre of the horizontal water barrel.

The tethering is via a large heavy oak pitman that in turn pushes upwards and downward as the axle rotates, this rotation can reach up to 125 rpms with 80 or 90 being a normal speed one at which the machinery is designed to run and run and run with very little maintenance whatever.

Now to answer your question---

You can see there is no clutch between the power source and the vertical blade, so to stop the mill the method that our 1858 mill was designed to use was as follows.--

At the end of the head race and in line with the water barrel directly below the blade there is an opening in the end wall of the head race of approx 24" by 36". On the inside suface of the wall along each edge of the opening are metal plates securely fastened. Against these plates slides a door (vertically) also with metal plates that bear against the ones on the wall. This door has fastened to it a heavy upright stem of oak (2 by 6) which reaches well above the raceway walls. fastened to this upright and cantilevered over a fulcrum is another rather heavy horizontal oak 2by 9 which is long enough to reach the exterior wall of the mill, now the tricky part is that this fulcrum has to be placed at the point that the weight of the 2 by9 should balance the weight of the door and vertical stem, but not quite.

Along the wall (on the upper level)extending down to the end of the 2by9 is a round pole that the sawyer can pull up on or shove down on depending on whether he wants to start or stop the mill.

This system works really well and I will explain.

To start the mill the sawyer shoves down and instantly opens up the gate fully allowing an inital thrust of water to hit the inside of the barrel wheel, this gives the equipment the power it needs to lift the pitman and the blade to the top of its first stroke, then the revolving motion with the momentum of the weight of the pitman the blade the 12" oak shaft, and the large cast collars gives the saw blade a smooth motion with the equipment acting like a flywheel so to speak.

To sort of end this discussion for tonight I will add that the sawyer can at his own discression slow down or speed up the mill with a gentle pull up or shove down on the pole by his side

This mill uses about 2000 gals of water per minute at full throttle

hope you all enjoy this little chat please ask any question and I will try and answer them to te best of my ability.

NH