At Large
Industry Developments
The 34th Annual Lumber Quality & Process Control Workshop will be held September 27-28, 2010 at Oregon State University’s College of Forestry in Corvallis.
This workshop is presented by the Lumber Quality Institute in cooperation with the Wood Science and Engineering Dept. at OSU. The program has a proven track record and is a must for sawmills seeking to maximize board foot and grade recovery. This workshop, with newly added material, provides practical information and up-to-date techniques that will help sawmill personnel.
Features
Making The Grade by Jennifer McCary
The driving force behind Pine Tech Inc.’s recent planer mill upgrade was the growing demand for appearance graded lumber. “With today’s appearance grade demand we needed to be able to pull an additional grade, which meant only 50% of our lumber was going to the stacker,” states President and co-owner Larry Markey. “To be able to pull more grades and automate all that hand sorting that we were doing we went with a trimmer and sorter installation on the output side.”
Pine Tech is an exclusive red pine mill producing dimension lumber, timbers and squares at two mill locations—Lake City and Gladwin, Mich. Lake City produces 80MMBF annually on a two-shift production schedule. Gladwin runs one shift producing 9MMBF annually.
Taking The Pressure by David Abbott
Fortress Wood Products, headquartered just north of the North Carolina state line, operates three wood products treating plants, all in North Carolina: Greensboro, Henderson and Elizabeth City. Fortress is one of many companies owned by The Lester Group, also based in Martinsville. The Lester Group started out as a sawmill in late 19th century. It no longer operates a sawmill but from that business it expanded into timber and property acquisitions, real estate development, building material yards and at one time a truss plant and a manufactured housing plant. The Lester Group bought Fortress in the mid 1980s. At the time Fortress was a single treating plant in Greensboro.
The management team for Fortress includes Brandt Mitchell, President; Jeff Kern, Vice President of Sales and Purchasing; and Jeff Grierson, Director of Operations. Fortress treats lumber, plywood and timbers with MCA, MCQ, ACQ, CCA and fire retardant chemicals, mostly for residential, marine, and commercial
Machinery Row
Equipment & Supplier News
In spite of overcast skies and a continual downpour, the mood was bright and sunny as hundreds of equipment dealers, customers and suppliers came together in March at the new head office of Sennebogen LLC for the company’s 10th Anniversary celebration and the grand opening of its new 54,000 sq. ft. parts and training facility. The celebration attracted many of the country’s best known names in the scrap and material handling industry.
Visitors were treated to a spectacular new building with a green and white façade that pays homage to the green line material handling machines. Even the address was new, 1957 Sennebogen Trail, as the town of Stanley, NC recently re-christened the road to recognize the newest major corporate citizen in the area.
News Feed
Hard News In The Making
Oregon State University and Virginia Tech have been chosen by the National Science Foundation to lead a new Industry/University Cooperative Research Center focused on wood-based composite materials in a $2.2 million, five-year research initiative.
The new center will facilitate the work of six faculty members and three graduate students per year at OSU, similar research initiatives at Virginia Tech, and collaborative work with eight private companies. These companies will each contribute at least $30,000 a year to support the programs. The companies are Arclin, Ashland, Inc., JELD-WEN, Hexion Specialty Chemical, Inc., Henkel, Weyerhaeuser Co. and Willamette Valley Co.
Opening Faces
Brookhaven by Rich Donnell
It’s full steam ahead for Rex Lumber Brookhaven LLC. That’s the name of the new operation at the former Columbus Lumber sawmill in Brookhaven, Miss. There’s a lot of lumber tradition in this integration, and an interesting twist on the Columbus Lumber side.
On the Rex Lumber side, this magazine has previously depicted the highly successful sawmill run of the McRae family. Some of it bears repeating here: that W. D. McRae, who was born in Mississippi and had worked in the lumber industry for some years in Mississippi and west Alabama, established Rex Lumber Co. in 1926 at Graceville, Fla., originally as a cypress sawmill and later as a manufacturer of oak flooring, and his three sons continued to run the business through most of the 1960s; that two of the sons eventually sold their interests, leaving the third son, Robert Sr., and his children, including Finley McRae, to expand the Graceville operation with a southern yellow pine sawmill, before selling the mill to Southwest
Product Scanner 10
Combing 2D and 3D Sensing
Properly implemented optimization of raw board can improve yields by 15% or more. In a larger sawmill cutting an average of 80MBF per shift, two shifts, resulting in 40MMBF per year, an additional 15% results in 6MMBF per year, which at $225 per MBF equals a return of $1,350,000 per year.
In board production, traditional optimization involves mounting banks of 3D laser sensors above and below board conveyor lines to provide high density 3D geometric profiles of each rough board as it passes the inspection station (Figure 1). The differential configuration, with sensors above and below the conveyor line, provides true board profiles even if boards are not sitting flat on the conveyor. Typical inspection rates are up to 120 boards per minute with some systems running as high as 200 boards per minute. Depending on the length of the boards, 20 or more sensors may be implemented for full surface coverage.
The Issues
Housing Trends by Jennifer McCary
As a baby boomer I grew up with certain expectations and accepted truisms. One of them was: Renting a home is as foolish as throwing money down the drain. Perhaps borne out of the Great Depression when so many became homeless, home ownership became a measure of success for my parents’ generation and the cornerstone of the American dream for mine. To wit, in the first 17 years of our marriage, my husband and I moved seven times. Yet only twice did we rent instead of purchase. Thankfully we have settled down and now have our eyes on a mortgage burning party…coming soon.
The current recession along with the social pressures of the green movement may very well redefine the American dream as it pertains to home ownership.