McShan Lumber Co. celebrated its 100th year anniversary at a mill function on September 29. Approximately 300 current and former employees, and members of the local community attended the event which was held in the planer mill building. Everyone feasted on shrimp and enjoyed music provided by local Blues celebrity, Willie King.

In a 1992 interview with Timber Processing, then president of Tolleson Lumber, Rusty Wood, described his late mentor and father-in-law, Buddy Tolleson, son of the company’s founder, as a progressive man who believed constant change is essential to the survival of any company.

Early this year in central Idaho, Adam Koogler, Bennett Forest Industries quality control technician, didn’t like what he was seeing: feed speed-related band saw wrecks. The high-speed random length mill was looking to move beyond startup mode and begin cranking out production, pushing hard on the facility’s USNR double-length infeed (DLI) headrig and downstream horizontal shape saw (HSS) curve-sawing gang to higher outputs—at feed speeds ranging up to 550 FPM.

Sawmillers in the Northwest and Intermountain regions have turned to Missoula Saws for saws, saw service and saw supplies for more than 40 years, as the company has grown from a saw shop with a great local reputation for quality saw work into a large, full service regional saw supplier that handles the sawing needs of more than 300 different industrial accounts, including 75-100 sawmills and other wood products firms.

Science has become a necessity in today’s mill environment—as production, recovery and market share determine who survives. I will only address two aspects of the sawing process: first, the monitoring of saw blade performance using on-line measurements of vibration and offset deflection or snake; and second, the controlling of that performance.

Climate change. Is it really happening? If so, is it a man-made problem? Whether you would answer “yes” to these questions or not, one thing is certain: Climate change has become a hot political topic. In the current absence of federal policy, many states have begun developing either voluntary or mandatory registries for facilities to report greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions.

One of Lynda Anthony’s earliest assessments of her family’s lumber business—and perhaps a clue of what her future held—came while she was still in high school. Her hometown of Springhill, La. was built around the sawmill, and with the high school football stadium right next door, Anthony worried about the mill’s appearance.