Shortly after Win Smith Jr. joined the family business in 1993, Limington Lumber Co. embarked on a program of steady, incremental process improvement resulting in an overall yield increase of roughly 15% and nearly 100% increase in production, now at 15-16MMBF annually. Production has been holding at that level for the last two to three years, which Smith notes is a volume that works well for them.

Two mornings of panel discussions and presentations on Cutting Tools are included in the conference portion of the Southern Forest Products Assn. Forest Products Machinery & Equipment Exposition to be held in New Orleans in June. The Expo machinery show, which features the world’s top sawmill machinery manufacturers, runs June 11-13 (Thursday-Saturday) at the New Orleans Morial Convention Center.

Like many wood products companies, J.V. Averitt Lumber Co. Inc., a privately owned family operation, has seen its fair share of ups and downs in its long history. Right now definitely qualifies for inclusion in the “down” category. “We seem to get more bad news daily,” says current owner Phil Averitt, who inherited the company from his father, J.V. Averitt, for whom the mill was named.

Three years ago Pike Lumber Co. management started looking at upgrading its board edger at its sawmill in Akron, Ind. to an optimized system. They established the following criteria: The operator should be able to adjust the optimized solution, downstream of the scanner, to combine the volume yield capabilities of existing optimizers with the operator’s ability to improve edging decisions based on visual defects.

Price LogPro started 2008 as a transition year following the purchase of Price Systems by the new ownership. Price LogPro was able to secure enough orders starting in mid 2008 to grow the existing business and staff by 25%. Sizable orders on the pulp and paper side came from Graphic Packaging/Macon Chips, Pacific Fiber, Willis Enterprises, Evergreen Paper, Local Manufacturing, Evergreen Fiber, Eastern Shore and Floyd’s Chipmill.

When Major League Baseball (MLB) was looking for experts to work on a project to reduce the frequency of broken baseball bats, they found two organizations in Madison, Wis. to join their team. TECO and the USDA Forest Products Laboratory joined Dr. Carl Morris, a Professor of Statistics at Harvard, and Dr. James Sherwood, a Professor of Mechanical Engineering at UMass-Lowell and Director of the UMass-Lowell Baseball Research Center, on a team of experts that analyzed 2,232 bats broken last year during MLB games between July 2 and September 7.

Simonds International reveals an innovation in the small diameter saw line. The intention of the Simonds “Glide” process is to eliminate the burr on the edges of the bore of a spline saw. While it sounds simple enough, it results in some remarkable impacts on the saws both in the filing room and on the mill floor, according to Simonds. Veteran saw expert Bob Howe came up with the development.