Cedar Creek Manufacturing 

About Us

The history of our Vertical Edger started in 1960 when Ken McCabe, a sawmill owner/operator in Barry County Michigan, started working on designing and building a Vertical Edger. He developed the idea from an article about sawmills in an old Department of Agriculture booklet. The article showed a picture of a sawmill on the west coast using a table edger on edge ahead of the head saw as a vertical Edger.

His first vertical edger had a single key mandrel with 16” saws, which proved to be too small and the single key caused too much vibration. To cure the vibration problem, the design was changed to a 2 key mandrel. It wasn’t long before he realized he had another problem. The keyways in the saw collars, as well as the keys, were wearing out with no way to fix them.

In his search to remedy the problem, he tried square shafting and hexagon shafting with no success. In 1983 Ken came up with the ROUND KEY MANDREL which made it possible to change the worn [round] keys when the saw collars worked loose.

Over the years, Ken built all kinds of sawmill equipment for other people as well as for himself. He built his first automatic carriage in 1957. Ken quit operating the sawmill in 1971, but continued to build equipment into the late 1980’s.

Cedar Creek Enterprises purchased the vertical edger portion of his business in 1991 and continued refining the design to its current state of dependability.