Roaring Camp Steam Sawmill

While visiting the Roaring Camp & Big Trees Railroad I found the Roaring Camp Steam Sawmill. This sawmill is fully operational and is operated during their Steam Festivals and other occasions. The open air sawmill is in pretty good shape for what appears to be an 1890's mill. Present are an Atlas Imperial engine (tagged as being made in Oakland California which is where I am assigned at the present) and a steam donkey engine with winch and a horizontal steam engine which runs the mill itself. The steam for the horizontal appears to come from the donkey engine boiler.

This is the Atlas Imperial tagged as being made in Oakland California. On first site I thought it was a diesel, but it has a spark plug in the head. If anyone can identify this engine please let me know. Thanks to Dave Walker and Stewart Marshall for assisting in the update of this unit: Stewart says "The little Atlas Imperial gas engine is an air compressor. One cylinder is the gas engine, the other is the compressor. They were supplied as auxilliary starting air compressors with the larger Atlas Imperial diesel engines the company supplied as marine and stationary engines. I have a 60 hp Atlas marine diesel in my tugboat and the engine weighs about 4 tons! I have a lot of info on these Atlas engines on my website (below). I worked on them most of my working life. The engine collectors love the little compressor engines like yours. The bigger Atlases are so heavy that it takes a big budget to restore one! Even so, many of them have been preserved here. There is at least one big Atlas down your way, in Sydney I think, that is being restored. It was brought down there by the US navy during the Second War."
http://www.rockisland.com/~marshall/

This shot shows the donkey engine boiler standing behind the mill. You cannot quite see the winch on the front of the donkey engine. The large horizontal steam engine powers the mill and appears to obtain steam from the donkey engine boiler. The drive is flat belt to the blade.

This blade is driven by the steam engine. You can see the drive pulley in the background and behind it the chute and chain which carry sawdust away from under the cutting floor.

This is the log carriage which carries the log to the blade where it is cut into planks. The levers you can see to the fore of the carriage adjust the depth of the cut by positioning the log. The carriage is drawn back and forth on a wire cable also driven by the steam engine.