Richard and Wallace Jones left the courthouse dispirited Wednesday.

PARIS – Both sides rested Wednesday in a two-day civil trial testing whether adequate safety standards were in place when a man was injured at a sawmill on the Jones family farm in North Waterford.

Oxford County Superior Court Judge Ellen Gorman will issue a ruling in the civil case within 30 days after final summations are filed by lawyers for both sides.

Sawmill owner Wallace Jones and his father, Richard, 82, who built the sawmill in the late 1960s, were dispirited leaving the courthouse Wednesday. They are being represented by Paris attorney Ted Kurtz.

Both men testified there was no safety guard in place when Adrien Morin Sr. lost the tip of his finger while operating the mill’s vibrating conveyor in March 1997. The conveyor was bought used, and Richard Jones testified Tuesday that it never came with any safety guard that he can recall.

Wallace Jones, 56, said he knew that the lack of a safety guard violates federal occupational health and safety standards, but emphatically maintained that he employed “reasonable safety standards” in running the mill.

He was in charge of starting up and shutting down the mill machinery each day, and if an employee ran into a problem, they were instructed to come and see him.

Morin, who was once a neighbor of the Joneses but now lives in Bethel, said he was pulling free a slab of wood that had become lodged in the moving belt and pulley system of the conveyor, which sends waste wood to a chipper, when he lost his finger tip. The belt moves at about 20 feet a second, and there was no time to pull his hand free.

Morin, through his lawyer, Thomas Dyhrberg of South Portland, is asking for monetary damages for lost wages, pain and suffering, and to pay for a second operation on the finger. Morin said the finger tends to break out in growths, throbs in cold weather and affects his job cutting branches for Lucas Tree Co.

The Joneses, who suffered a devastating fire last fall that destroyed their 225-year-old home and barn about 1,000 feet uphill from the sawmill, own around 300 acres with spectacular views of the White Mountains. They are rebuilding, and live in a mobile trailer they bought to get them through the winter.

They have never had insurance on any of the farm buildings, including the sawmill, and did not pay workers compensation insurance for Morin or other sawmill employees.

On Tuesday, Dr. John Wilson, a mechanical engineer at the University of New Hampshire who has testified at other sawmill injury trials, said that in his view, the Jones mill was “at or near the bottom” of the list of sawmills he has inspected “in terms of attention to hazards.”

Wilson toured the mill with Kurtz, Dyhrberg and the Jones family in June 2003.

He said he found several areas where the “pinch points” or motion hazards were not properly guarded.

“I don’t think it was a safe workplace at all. I saw many places which were potentially dangerous,” said Wilson, who estimated he had inspected between eight and 15 sawmills in his career, mostly in New Hampshire.

The day of the accident, Wallace Jones, who was acting as usual as the mill’s sawyer, said he had stopped production and gone outside to talk to an employee who was piling wood.

A few minutes later, Wallace Jones testified, “Morin was coming across holding his hand, and the tip of his glove and his finger was gone.”

Jones said “I do recall asking him why the hell he didn’t shut that thing off.”