The Fascinating Story of Wood-Mizer, The Portable Sawmill That Changed Small Logging

In 1982, two men in Indianapolis sat down with a piece of scrap paper. Don Laskowski was an electrical engineer from North Dakota. Dan Tekulve was his business partner. Neither had ever owned a sawmill. Neither had ever cut a log for a living. Every previous attempt at a thin-kerf portable bandmill had failed. Three months later, their first machine cut its first board. Forty-four years later, more than 80,000 of their sawmills run in 120 countries. This is the story of Wood-Mizer — the portable sawmill that rewrote a 200-year-old industry. Discover how two outsiders with no sawmilling experience built the first commercially successful thin-kerf portable bandmill in a garage in Indianapolis. Learn how their thin-kerf blade technology produced 20% more boards per log than conventional circle blade mills, and how their inverted design — where the blade moved instead of the log — made the entire machine light enough to tow behind a small car. Follow the company's journey from a single sawmill delivered personally by Don Laskowski to a buyer in New York in 1982, to a global manufacturer with factories in Indianapolis and Koło, Poland. Hear how Polish entrepreneur Jerzy Hajduczyk drove Don across post-communist Poland in a tiny Fiat 126p to launch Wood-Mizer Europe, and how the Great Storm of 1987 — which felled 15 million trees across England — created a sudden surge of European demand that no conventional mill could meet. Explore the economic revolution the Wood-Mizer set off in small logging. Before 1982, owning a sawmill required a building, a crew of trained workers, and an experienced filer to maintain the blades. Wood-Mizer collapsed all of that into a one-person operation. Farmers could mill their own fence posts. Hobbyists could mill furniture stock. Storm-felled trees that would have been firewood became finished lumber. The video also covers the unusual decision Don Laskowski and Dan Tekulve made in 2004 — selling 53.9% of Wood-Mizer to its own employees at less than half of market value. By November 2007, the company was 100% employee-owned. Most of the proceeds went to the Laskowski Family Foundation and the Tekulve Bless Foundation. Today, Wood-Mizer employs approximately 1,100 people across 25 countries with subsidiaries on every continent. The market category the founders created in 1982 now supports an entire industry, including competitors like Norwood Industries, Hud Son, TimberKing, and Woodland Mills. Dan Tekulve passed away in April 2017 at age 71. Don Laskowski died on May 30, 2020 at age 89. Their legacy continues through more than 100,000 sawmill owners worldwide. This is the fascinating story of two outsiders who disagreed with every expert who told them it could not be done — and changed how the world turns logs into lumber.