One of the changes on Appalachian Renegade will be updates on the community center. As promised on a reply to a comment on NCRenegade.com, I am outlining two new equipment purchases for our workshop.

The first is our new planer. We had a smaller Dewalt planer but our expanded wood operations required a larger one. We bought a South Bend SB1109 earlier this summer.

This planer allows us to efficiently plane lumber from our sawmill. Fortunately for us, we bought this unit prior to the new tariffs imposed. Not only are we able to plane larger widths, the unit is very quiet. We also incorporated a larger dust collection system for the shop. An unexpected benefit to this unit is the fast collection of wood shavings (oak and popular hardwoods) that are used for media to grow mushrooms for our new Smoky Mountain Mushrooms.

The second piece of woodworking equipment was a new table saw. Our existing table saw was 40 years old. The issue was horsepower: we needed a 5HP saw to cut thicker dimensional lumber from the mill. The new 220V saw and router table from Grizzly.com is shown below:

I am a big proponent of converting fiat currency to assets to help rebuild this fallen nation.