Pacific Lumber Co.’s timberlands subsidiary, Scotia Pacific Co., is offering for sale more than a quarter of its 220,000 acres of land in Humboldt County, Calif. as part of restructuring efforts. The lands for sale are a combination of Douglas fir timberlands, ranchlands and recreational areas that, according to the company, do not figure in its core business as a producer of redwood lumber.

Where the road ends along North Bend’s north sand spit, Southport Forest Products has significantly expanded its operations with a new greenfield mill, Southport Lumber Co., that’s producing almost 200MBF per shift with only 12 employees, thanks to a “one of a kind” installation USNR single-pass breakdown line backed by a FinScan automatic board grader and new Baxley Equipment trimming, sorting and lumber handling machinery—all fed by a new PSI merchandising line with USNR bucking optimization.

Four years ago, construction began on a new sawmill building to house a soon-to-be modernized Quality Hardwoods, Inc. In September 2005, the company completed the second phase of its five-year expansion program. Total investment at this point is in the neighborhood of $5 million. There’s more to come.

Long-range economic events can be stripped down into three basic components: trend, cyclical and random. The first two are subject to analysis and reasonably accurate prediction. The unfortunate tendency of the latter random element to intrude and often overwhelm the first two makes economic prognostication somewhat speculative but still worthwhile exercise.

After taking 2005 off, the Wood Technology Clinic & Show returns to Portland this spring, and exhibitors are predicting a strong event.“Taking the year off was a good idea,” according to Bill Beck, Sawmill Sales Manager of Iggesund Tools. “Now we have two years of pent-up interest, and manufacturers have had time to come up with something new.”

The writing was on the wall many years ago, but Jim Hurst continued to look the other way. Despite the collapse of the national forest timber sale program, Hurst managed to keep Owens & Hurst Lumber Co. afloat and profitable until the softwood sawmill’s dying day, which sadly came at the end of May 2005, about five months after Hurst had informed his employees that the end of the Eureka, Mont. business drew nigh.

JoeScan, Inc.’s JS-20DL is an innovative and economical dual-laser scanner that addresses common scanning challenges such as short infeeds and headrig carriages. A JS-20DL scanning system provides accurate shape data on both the front and back surfaces of a log on headrig carriages, and the addition of backside scan data provides a recovery gain over frontside-only scanning.