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Not Your Run of the Mill Lumberman: Going Strong at 78

November 15, 2010 - WALES -- From a padded seat in a tiny wooden and Plexiglas enclosure, George W. Gustin pressed buttons and pushed and pulled two fat gray joysticks, controlling the position and passage of a thick oak log.

After mechanical dogs rolled and adjusted the log, vertical and horizontal saws trimmed it neatly into uniform 12-foot-long planks.

They will become new decking for a firewood processor just up the hill Gustin runs with his son. Father and son sell 100 to 150 cords of wood a year.

Using the same blades, Gustin earlier sawed 24-foot-long, 8-inch-by-8 inch-timbers for a man who wanted to block up a house and barn prior to having them moved.

Gustin, 78, continues to design and build machinery just as he's done all his life. His skills allow him to build horizontal saws, to wire generators and operate all sorts of heavy machinery, including an entire sawmill by himself.

Gustin is a pro, operating a sawmill that uses chains, pulleys, booms and conveyors to do the heavy work of sawing and shifting wood.

A small black-and-white video screen displays the dimensions he sets on a computer.

He knows precisely the size boards he wants, and the gears shift back and forth to slice efficiently and allow for a quarter-inch width for the saw blade.

"You try to position the log with the curved ends up or belly up," he said. "That allows you to get the widest board possible from the log." He also wants to avoid a spike knot that would weaken the board strength.

The mill's wooden floor vibrates as the machinery thrums and machines rotate logs.

Gustin runs the mill alone. "What I'm doing is what my father used to have five men doing," Gustin said.

Without orders for anchor logs or pallet sticks, he has fewer reasons to operate the once-busy sawmill.

"I used to retail everything I sawed," he said. Then Home Depot and other large retailers arrived. He moved into sawing hardwood for anchor logs for Central Maine Power Company.

"My father had a sawmill during World War II," Gustin said. "I was 14 when I started in working with him; my brother and I did. I've had four different mills; some haven't been very good to me, but this one has been good to me."

He's says he's planning to retire when he reaches 85, and until then, "I want to work every morning."

Gustin, who has lived for 48 years on the hillside on Ridge Road, graduated from Edward Little High School in Auburn. He joined the U.S. Navy, heading to Korea as a heavy equipment operator in the Seabees in 1952. He spent two years there, a year in Adek, Alaska, and then finished his four-year hitch in the Philippines.

After being discharged in San Francisco one Friday, Gustin drove through the night to be at a job in the Oregon woods at 6 a.m. the next day. Six weeks later he headed east, driving nonstop from Des Moines to Maine.

When he arrived, his brother, Lewis Alphonso "Fon" Gustin, now of Greene, had set him up with a date. They had balcony seats for a play at The Theater at Monmouth.

"I fell asleep and I was going right over the rail," Gustin said. His date -- who later became his wife -- pulled him back.

Gustin enrolled at the University of Maine, and did well in physics, chemistry and math. But writing was a problem.

"I couldn't handle the Queen's English," he said, "so they asked me to leave."

He then worked in construction at the Nike missile sites near Limestone, at the building of the Eisenhower Lock in Massena, N.Y., at the Niagara Falls Power project near Rochester, N.Y., and on the interstate in Waterbury, Vt.

He returned to work with Maine wood 49 years ago after construction jobs ran dry and his oldest daughter was ready to start school. He incorporated his business, Hardwood Pre-cut Inc., in 1968.

Gustin offers visitors a tour of his current operation, stopping in at a small wooden building to turn on the turbo-charged Caterpillar 250 kw generator which pumps gray smoke out a horizontal stack. "It's the best mosquito control," he adds.

Years ago he invested $30,000 in the generator when the demand charge on his Central Maine Power Co. bill reached $1,000 a month. In 30 months he recouped his investment, he said, and began putting aside $1,000 month for a new equipment fund. Later, he purchased a supercharged 150-kw generator for days when he doesn't need much power.

In the ice storm of 1998, he ran lines from his generator house to several neighboring houses and powered them for about two weeks until the utility could reconnect the electricity.

After turning on the generator, he does a few dry runs with the saws and chains "to loosen up the oil."

Working alone, he can produce 2,000 board feet a day. That starts with the debarking and ends with the stacking of the finished planks. The sawmill itself, he said, could cut 2,000 board feet in an hour.

He's always got an idea to improve his various mills.

About 40 years ago Gustin made his own vertical edger.

"My sons, 11 and 12, were taking the lumber away; they couldn't handle the lumber as fast as it was coming off the saw -- it was too heavy," he said. So he designed and built the edger; shortly after that he began to see and hear about other vertical edgers.

He recycles what he can.

"The mill that I had at Leeds Junction went broke about 1960 and I went to work as an electrician for five or six years," he said. "When I started the sawmill (on Ridge Road) I didn't have any money."

One of his conveyor chains on the log deck came out of a car wash in Auburn.

His yard truck is on its seventh engine -- all installed by him -- and he added an auxiliary diesel engine to run a pump to run the loader.

His mill accommodates long logs and turns out tall timber. "I can saw 24 feet here," he said, and sometimes he needs to as in the case of hemlock being cut to replace rotted timbers in the rebuilding of a steeple at Wales Presbyterian Church.

Cal Brown of Litchfield has bought wood from Gustin since 1976, and later served with him on the school board of then-School Union 44, Litchfield, Sabattus and Wales. They two remain friends.

"It's just amazing what he has done," Brown said.

Brown recalled one particularly specialty order.

"My wife wanted a 12-foot-long birch mantle with a live edge," Brown said. "I told him to pick me out a select piece. He called me three or four months later to come pick it up." Brown's wife was delighted with it.

In Gustin's rambling wooden mill, nothing's wasted.

As the heavy saws slice the wood, vibrating conveyors carry the waste across the mill to a chipper. When the belt is plugged, Gustin uses a long board to unclog the intake, and the grinding noises sound like automatic machine gun fire.

The wood chips are screened and pumped into a tractor-trailer that sometimes heads to a biomass plant or a paper mill. He's even built a chip burner to heat his home.

On the ground floor of a nearby two-story barn, sawdust is collected and formed under pressure into pellets. Large round ductwork pipes in hot air -- a by-product of the generators -- to dry the sawdust.

He holds out a handful of pellets in his left hand. He's missing a finger and part of the thumb from an accident with a saw about four years ago. Six years ago he fell off a log loader and broke his pelvis and back in seven places. He healed up nicely with expert care from his wife, Kay, a retired nurse. The two have been married for 54 years.

His customers know where to find him.

"Way back when I set the mill here, there were lots of dairy farms around that used quite a lot of lumber for building maintenance," he said. Then he moved into making pallets for several businesses.

He can saw year-round. "It's kind of a busy little place some times," he said.

BY BETTY ADAMS Staff Writer, Kennebec Journal 11/15/10


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