Nice to hear from you guys your questions help to expand on this conversation for the benefit of others.
Ken-JIm:
We have to clarify one technical aspect of this type of mill A Mulley Mill operates with a free standing blade, which is an improvement on the earlier style of what was referred to as a sash saw, or a rather thinner blade which had to be restrained in a wooden sash, and the whole sash had to be lifted and lowered to move the blade up or down so the cutting action could be done.
The Mulley blade was about 3\16 " in thickness and as I mention earlier the teeth are about 2" in length at 2.25" spacings and the configuration is almost identical to a rip tooth on a small hand saw. The bottom edge of the tooth is almost square out from the blade (not quite) and sharpened square across and slightly beveled on the other remaining angled edge.
There were two methods of preparing the tooth for the cutting action the first was to slightly bend the tip of each alternating tooth slightly to create a kerf, or swedge the tooth tip to also create a kerf.
We always slightly bent the tooth tip which seemed to work well, so I cannot speak for the other method. I do feel though that it would work well used by an experienced mill operator.
Anoter thing that we always did was to peel a slight channel in the bark ahead of the blade on the initial cut to ensure that removal of any hidden debris was effected cleanly for the blade.
These blades dulled easily and if the teeth became damaged on one side the blade would then begin to wander and heating problems would develop and poor quality lumber with uneven thicknesses would be noticed