kerf was, my new theory was that I had been feeding the saw through the wood too fast. The sawdust from this oak was relatively sticky, so it doesn't come out as easily. Once I fed the saw much slower, the drift problems went away. With the slightly larger than 3" pulley on my 3500 RPM motor, I was running the saw at about 3300 Feet per minute, or about 1000 meters per minute. Relatively fast for a bandsaw, but slow for a sawmill. Given that I wasn't limited in power, I could have used a larger pulley on the motor to run the blade faster. As an experiment, I cut much faster for the last 5 cm of this log, and sure enough, the blade started drifting when I did that. Looking at the log afterwards, I could see there was more sawdust left in the kerf for the part that I'd cut much faster. Milling up the rest of those sections of oak went fairly well, although perhaps a bit slow, feeding the saw at maybe 3 ft (1 meter) per minute. Occasionally, I backed up the saw, watching to see how much sawdust the blade would scrape out of the kerf as I backed it up, just to make sure I wasn't leaving excessive amounts of sawdust in there. I also tackled the huge piece of Norway maple. My sawmill is designed to deal with an absolute maximum of 40 cm (16") diameter of logs, and this