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A crew of at least three workers is needed to operate the mill, Chuck said, "but it's better if we have four or five."
The sawyer works the stick, with off-bearers on one end, and log rollers on the other. There's no shortage of volunteers.
"When I saw the mill laying in pieces under the trees," Alan Rudd recalled, "I said 'Hey, I want to be a sawmill guy.'"
"It's a really dangerous thing to play with," Alan said. "If a blade breaks, or if it hits a piece of steel - like a horseshoe or a railroad spike that a tree's grown around -- and you don't know it's there ... well, pieces of that metal fly everywhere."
"And a piece of the board can catch and fly the opposite direction," Chuck added. "That's why we put that screen up at the end. We just have to make sure it's safe."
The emphasis on safety is not only for the workers' benefit. The sawmill is a big attraction at Flywheeler Park.
"We get a lot of people over here, just watching," Chuck said. "The old timers, they like to remember when they worked around equipment like this. There's a lot of nostalgia about it. And they like to tell us stories about sawmills; they provide a lot of information."
For others, it's a new experience. "I get such a kick out of the people watching," Alan said. "A lot of people have never seen a sawmill in operation."
Not only do they see the mill in action, they see the results: much of the construction at Flywheeler Park has utilized lumber from the vintage mill. Local yellow pine and red hard cedar has been used in the park's covered bridge, for fencing, framing, small bridges, catwalks and out-buildings. The bark layer is used to fire the steam engine's boiler (hard oak is used to build up heat).